How do we sell product design when no one is buying?

Let's set the scene

Everyone is complaining about everything; designers can't get jobs, and companies are complaining about the lack of quality in the talent pool, even though the supply of designers is at an all time high.

In the mean time product design has gone completely in house, and is now basically owned by management, mostly because of designers' unwillingness to accept the fact that product design is a collaborative effort, and decision making is not solely within their authority.

On top of that, there is far less money going around, and hardly anyone is investing in new things (outside of maybe crypto?) There is a major shift on the horizon. People are careful.

Getting a product design job

By this I mean selling design services in the form of full or part time employment.

The market at the moment is flooded with designers who have either graduated from some flimsy course, from school, or have recently lost a job. There's tons of you, and your prospective employers are getting reamed with applications from non-qualifiers. People are desperate and are playing it like a numbers game. After all, it's what they heard on YouTube from some asshole who said they should just be persistent and send their AI-edited resume to as many addresses as they can possibly can.

This makes the employers lose faith, and grow tired of sifting through this junk. They turn to their network and try to fill roles “behind the scenes” because no one wants to deal with this crap anymore. Congratulations, you've made your potential employers unavailable.

In the mean time, the expectations from designers have seriously risen up. The competition is global, and people from all over the world are fighting for their piece of the pie. You can do UX but not UI? Sorry, you lose. You spent your career focusing on “the craft”, but the employers expects you to be strategic? You guessed it, you lose again.

What could be a better alternative than brute forcing your way into a job you will most likely lose very soon?

1. Build a personal brand: too costly, too late. It would be an awesome idea if you started five years ago, though.
2. Push your work: a good option, provided your work is visually attractive, and simple enough to be used effectively on social media. This works for a lot of folks, apparently.
3. Network: a good option if you still remember how to do it. However it's kind of simple: try to hang out near people you want to work with.
4. Stunts: start a service like “hero roast”, or a provoking redesign. Make it your thing and try to productize it until it lands you a job.

Whatever it may be, your best bet is to reinvent yourself as a generalist—hopefully you are one already—who is able to produce what was a team-level of results just a couple of years before. This of course requires you to master AI, and wield it in such a way that you are able to do this.

Now seriously, there is no way of going around AI. You have to learn how to use it. View it as a productivity multiplier, not a replacement or skill gap filler.

Selling product design as a service

I've accepted that product design agencies are going to either die a slow death, or they are going to transform into product/hacking studios. What little there is of interesting work is being gobbled up by the big names, and the opportunities with an actual chance to become businesses are no longer comfortable with outsourcing such a delicate area of their company such as product (design).

This is where I have the most personal experience, being a CEO of a design agency. Superawesome has been in the product game for a long time, and we've always been aware that it is in the nature of this service to have an end of life at some point. While we still have clients that have been with us for 5+ years, it is no longer realistic to think that this is likely to keep happening. Our tenure has gone from 5+ years, to 2+ years, to a whopping 6 months. Six months from onboarding to knowledge transfer to the new internal design team.

The conclusion is that product design is now simply too precious to outsource. But for the sake of argument, how would one go about selling product design as a service these days?

1. Sell to organizationss that are engineering-oriented and don't understand product.
2. Sell to organizations that are new to digital, meaning they are traditional orgs with a recognized need to go digital.
3. White label your services to other agencies who are doing better in this climate.

These are all very tough asks, and demand you as a sales person go way out of your comfort zone in order to meet your prospects where they are (as they likely don't know they need your services at all).

The near-term future is bleak for traditional creative service providers as I see it. The main challenge is to redefine the creative process in terms of which parts of it need to be done by humans, and which parts can and should be automated away. Then we need to realign design services with the new business requirements and come up with a new value proposition of a design agency: what do you have over an in-house team, or an AI agent (or a team thereof)?

This was tough before as design is mostly viewed as a cost center, and not a value generator by the majority of organizations. It's only going to get tougher now that these same organizations that tried to invest in design, had "design leaders" fail them en masse—which is the sentiment now—by their unwillingness to accept that design is a collaborative effort, and not a dictatorship of a single department.

I don't know what to tell you other than: move fast and make things—that AI can't (yet) make.

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