Getting ready for 2025

Issue 227: Key focuses in the new year

Jan 05, 2025

Happy New Year. This decade is moving fast; nearly at the halfway mark already. The unprecedented events early 2020 forced tech to hit the factory reset button. It marked the end of the blitzscaling era of tech and seem to be on the other side of the volatility. However, we’re not through it yet. In this issue, let’s look at the forces of nature in play, skills that will serve software designers well, and reflect on how you might think of this year in prep for the second half of the decade.

Forces of nature

This non-prediction is based on patterns from the past I’ve observed. Though things are seemingly improving, it takes time for new norms to form. There are three primary forces of nature I see looming for designers this decade.

The first is organizations will continue restructures. Unfortunately, I expect abrupt layoffs to persist. Some will be done as responsible and humane as possible. Others, not so much. The topic of layoffs is not a fun one. However, keep in mind it may continue. In the new norms there is more pressure to spend less and do more with less. Is it fair? That’s debatable. Is it a reality we face? Yes.

Companies that existed before 2020 need to navigate the new norms. However, startups newly formed have the opportunity to build on the premise of the new norms. This leads to the second force of nature; The era of bootstrapping generalists. Specialists will not go away and remain valuable, but we are in the era where generalists have the proper augmentation around them to be dangerous. At Replit, we talked about the Fortune 500 becoming the Fortune 5,000,000 due to empowered individuals who can do more with less. My point of view is this is how org restructures normalize. Larger teams are getting reduced which prompts people starting companies.

Whether you're going for a seed stage startup or a large enterprise, everyone is going for a bootstrapper mindset and working lean.

The final force of nature may compel you to stab a fork in your eye (don't do this please), but people will continue talking about craft and taste. This includes me. I understand it can be annoying as the two words get thrown around constantly, but it's the basis of what will be important.

The first is craft is the differentiator moving forward to AI. AI won't replace the craft of our work. It'll commoditize the basic and elevate value of the high quality. This is the equivalent of being able to purchase a $10 shirt from Target and a $100 one from a designer store; same function, different perceived value.

The second is we are catching up from a lapse in craft during the blitzscaling era. This is why every team wants high craft. They aren't looking only for a person good at their own craft but can elevate it for the entire organization. You might hate the vagueness of craft and taste, and that it doesn't encompass all of what design and software making entails, but it's going to come up. Be ready for it.

Skills to (re-)develop

Don’t call it a re-skill. The following are existing foundational skills that have existsed for decades. I’m emphasizing these areas areas to reinvest in a world where designers are encouraged to be expansive in their range.

First, learn to Promptotype—a term coined by Eduardo Sonnino on our AI Design team. The phrase is a play on the classic skill of prototyping, but using LLMs and Gen AI to craft them. Let’s bypass the discourse designers should code (the answer is “yes” BTW) and focus on designers using code to get work done.

Between Replit, Bolt, Vercel v0, and Cursor AI, the barrier to make things with code has never been lower. There are two major benefits to learn Promptotyping. The first is you're dogfooding and testing workflows of people building with AI as you use AI (very meta). Second, you're able to do more sophisticated functionality spikes than you possibly could with any UI drawing tool.

The most differentiating skill is UI Design. Now is the right time to be utterly exceptional at it. For now, Generative AI struggles to be differentiating in high quality interfaces. In fact, it’s pretty bad at front end experiences. Designers who are exceptional at designing elegant interfaces have a strong starting point with AI to customize and make something beautiful.

The decade-long advice I’ve given junior designers entering the job market is people will always take a chance on someone with great UI Design intuition because the rest of the experiences can be taught. Being a great UI Designer isn’t a god-given talent, but it takes years of foundational practice. That’s why high potential designers with UI craft is a high calculated bet.

Finally, get good at Diagramming. Over the winter break I read Abbie Covert's book, Stuck? Diagrams help—a great read for people of various experience levels.Whether it's a technical or customer map, diagramming is an important skill. AI workflows for humans often span across multiple features in a non-linear job to be done, and the ability to diagram it is helpful. The better you're able to map customer workflows to product and technical systems, you'll understand what the top impact areas are to design/prototype (or promptotype).

Here’s to an impactful 2025

I enter 2025 with a lot of hope. In these last four full years, I’ve seen people get laid off and bounce back by starting their own companies. We’ve seen talent density cluster at companies again like we did in the early 2010s. As someone who lived through The Great Recession, things did bounce back. Perhaps on the other side of this we see a thriving market and blitzscaling come back (though I don’t think it needs to).

If you’re pondering what 2025 looks like for you, consider a few reflections: