Kshitiz Jain

HCI @UCL, prev. design @leapscholar, NIT Bhopal 👨‍🎓, alum @10KDesigners

[Kshitiz Jain @Kshitiz675]

Every conversation I have with founders and investors in London somehow ends with "you should move to the US."

[Kshitiz Jain @Kshitiz675]

All of the people I hangout with are either 30+ or in their 40s, is something wrong with me ? 😂

Its becoming harder for me to make friends of my age

[Sejal Sud @SejalSud]

Money is meant to be spent on people you love

There’s no other better use for it :/

[arnav @arnav_kumar]

Only two roles exist in PED (Product, engineering, design) teams

1. Slop Canon - can vibe code and experiment at insane velocity.
Completely independently
Test a crazy number of hypothesis
Land something valuable
10% hit rate

Persona - Restless, Tinkerer, Creative, polygot, loves taking control.
Dislikes giving away responsibility/delegating to another human.
Loves delegating to Agents and talking to Users
Hates building alignment with humans
Feels humans are too slow
One person army

2. Grown ups - take what the slop canon has uncovered.
Build a proper product.
Ensure the best architecture/security/growth motion/business goal alignment
50%+ hit rate on scaling up the insight

Persona - Strategic, Cross function operator, understands product, business, user persona, competitive dynamics, market structures intimately.
Comfortable talking to all functions in the company.. engineering, finance, business, customer support.
Ninja at building alignment and consensus.
Incredible at strategic calls, including capital and resource allocation.
Understands growth motions

All other roles will either go extinct (eg: I only do design, don't want to own metrics)
Or they will get very niche / super specialised (eg: top 1% data scientist, math PhD)

If you are not killing it at one of these two persona, you better be top 1% in the world at what you do

Ps: first hit when I saw a talk by the every company founder
Can't find it but credit to them

[Bhumika Mittal @mittalbhumika7]

Maybe Calvin (1992) knew it all along

[Kshitiz Jain @Kshitiz675]

Mothers and their obsession with calling you just to talk to everyone on the call except you.

[Akansha Dugad @AkanshaDugad]

DO THE HARD THING.

[Akshat Shrivastava @Akshat_World]

1) Make money.
2) Get Golden Visas.
3) Save taxes.
4) Use lower taxes to make more money.
5) Create more free time, get global mobility, respect.
6) Improve your health with that free time.
7) Coach your kids/others about health + wealth.
8) Engage with high value people (growth mindset).
9) Build a winning ecosystem.
10) Make more money.
11) Enjoy life.

Stop bothering about politics.

Even politicians (across parties) do not care about you. Or even politics.

They too care about their own money.
Politics is just a tool to make that wealth faster.

[Kshitiz Jain @Kshitiz675]

The best flatmates are the ones who are barely home and only come back to sleep, so you pay half the rent and get the whole apartment in peace 😂

[Sagar Shah @sa64r]

We're now on the London Startup Map.

674 startups with London offices, plotted by neighbourhood, stage and sector. Tano is the dot on the Strand.

Most of those 674 are within walking distance of each other. Still the best argument for being here.

https://t.co/gdZZNahup6

[Sejal Sud @SejalSud]

Reminder:

[Pratham @prthmo]

editing claude code's plans in the terminal sucks.

built a plugin to review, edit, and approve plans in a proper UI instead

npx -y @prathamux/planui@latest setup

[Kshitiz Jain @Kshitiz675]

Exciting times ahead 🥳🔥

[Digital Trends @DigitalTrends]

#Meta is opening up the Ray-Ban Display glasses to third-party developers, and it could change how useful smart glasses actually are in your daily life. https://t.co/daBweyg5e0

[Yash Jadhav @farzi_rtist]

@KP24 Enough of leather and tennis ball cricket… the real gully cricket is with us on a plastic ball

Challenge accepted? 💪

[Kshitiz Jain @Kshitiz675]

I met someone at a random meetup in London who’s doing a PhD in generative AI at Oxford and working with the NHS on using it to tackle cancer, crazy how you can just run into people like that in this city

[Charmie Kapoor @charmiekapoor]

[For every designer who is scared right now 🩶]

If the AI stress is catching up to you or you're feeling left behind, take out 5 mins and read this.

Nobody really knows how to survive this 'wave'. Even the people building these AI products don't know the future. And if someone's handing you a clear cut path, they're probably selling something.

I'm writing this based on the people I know. Some of them are building these tools, some are switching roles. Many just reached out because they didn't know who else to ask.

Over the last ten years, I have watched parts of this industry shift. Photoshop to Illustrator to Sketch to Figma. Each time the tool changed, the designer role also evolved. With AI, this is a much bigger move, but that sense of fear feels exactly the same.

Here's what I'm actually seeing:

Design roles are contracting.
It is real. The junior and intern-level work is the most exposed right now, because AI can do a lot of what a new designer would spend their first year learning.

Senior designers with strong networks and reputations are largely okay, but not untouchable. Many managers honestly, are more worried than they're letting on. A lot of them haven't touched tools in years.

There's also something happening with hiring where managers aren't bringing on juniors right now. Some of it is tight budgets, but a lot of it is that they don't know how to grow someone in this environment anymore. There's no clear ladder to point to.

–

The roles that remain look different.
Companies are now deliberately building out senior and principal IC tracks so the best craft people don't have to choose between growing and managing. A senior designer who goes extremely deep, who has strong taste, ships things and shapes product decisions, is very valuable today.

The new shape for a design manager is someone who should also build. They should use tools to prototype fast, validate ideas quickly, show rather than tell. A manager who can demo something in a meeting rather than describe it is a completely different asset.

UX writing, content design, marketing are merging into product thinking in a way they weren't before. Designers who can write, actually write well are powerful.

–

Experiment on your own before it's pushed on you.
The design process is changing. The double diamond, the wireframe, the detailed case studies are starting to feel dated. What's replacing it has a lot more building and shipping than documenting and presenting.

Don't upskill frantically. Just because a new tool dropped doesn't mean you have to master it. At this rate you'll just burn out chasing things. Pick one process you already do and figure out where AI actually helps within it. Pressure test an idea, poke holes in your reasoning, generate great visuals, explore a direction you'd have killed too early. Get really good at one or two things vs half baked many.

Don't get attached to tools. The designers who struggled most through every tool shift were the ones whose identity was too tied to what they already knew. Being the best Framer person in the room was never the point. It was always the work itself.

–

Learn some code. Even a little.
I say this as someone who never wrote code before. Think of it like a 30-day experiment, not a career change. I can share more on how I approached this because I know how intimidating that sentence sounds.

Build live things. No one wants static mocks sitting in Figma. See if you can do interactive project demos, solve your own problems by building small tools, push things out, let people use them. A live product in your portfolio right now is worth more than ten polished case studies with no shipping story behind them.

–

People want a point of view. Generic work is losing.
Execution is cheap now. A lot of work is starting to look the same and the ones standing out have something to say. Bring that to your work.

Freelancing overall has a lot more money in it right now. But if you're producing generic, template-level work, you're probably in danger. Niche and specific is where the premium is going, and that gap is only going to widen.

A lot of people who joined design during the covid wave, drawn by the stability or the salary or the sense that the process was settled, will probably leave. That's okay, maybe even good. Design has always been a craft that changes. The ones who stay will be the ones who actually want to build things.

–

Be someone people want to work with.
Being easy to work with is underrated and always will be. Being collaborative, fun to work with, easy to communicate with async – all this builds up over years in ways no tool can replicate. I've seen technically average designers outlast brilliant ones because of exactly this.

Being a good hire isn't just your portfolio. People imagine what it would be like to talk to you, brainstorm with you, disagree with you, and sit in a room with you for two hours every week. Work on that too.

Who you surround yourself with matters too. If you don't have people to look up to at your work, find small tight communities that do the kind of work you like and actually share it. I prefer these over large noisy ones. Some big Discord ones are mostly anxiety and self-promotion.

–

If you're early career, this is for you specifically.
I've had many recent grads and those just finishing a bootcamp struggling to find work. I want to say this clearly that is not a reflection of your ability. The timing is just brutal right now and that's not on you.

If you're just starting out, look for lean startups or agencies. They still desperately need designers who can think and move fast. Get in the room first and figure out long term plans from there.

Hiring pipelines are filled due to mass applications. Post your work online, share WIP experiments, DM the founder whose app you redesigned just for fun. Nobody is coming to find you. You have to shamelessly show up.

–

More people are building now because friction has never been lower. A lot of them are discovering mid-build that design is what separates good from forgettable. That's not nothing.

There's also a new kind of client emerging. Solo builders, indie founders, one-person companies shipping at scale. They don't need a design team but one designer who can build alongside them. That role is growing and it's genuinely interesting work.

Yes there's anxiety. But there's also more to build and more personality to showcase. That's where I'd put my energy.

[arnav @arnav_kumar]

The source of all suffering is the distance between our desires and our actions.

Close the gap.
Want less.
Do more.

[Daryl Ginn @darylginn]

Eventually every designer ends up with a text-only portfolio.

[Kshitiz Jain @Kshitiz675]

@AkanshaDugad Looks nice 🙌

[Kshitiz Jain @Kshitiz675]

Fam ❤️