Every tool should earn its seat

A year and a half ago, I joined CapIntel. This week, I was promoted to Principal Product Designer. Which feels incredible. Not in the “I have ascended into corporate enlightenment” kind of way. More in the “holy shit, I’m trusted to solve bigger problems now” kind of way.

And honestly, that trust has changed how I think about design. The more senior I get, the less I care about making beautiful static screens that sit in Figma collecting digital dust. I care about momentum. Can we test the idea faster? Can we get closer to the real product? Can we reduce the gap between design, engineering, and what customers actually experience?

That’s been the theme of my week. Promotion, bigger ownership, and a very obvious realization that I don’t want my workflow trapped inside tools that make me feel productive while quietly slowing me down.

Then a LinkedIn post hit harder than I expected, and it made the whole thing feel a lot less theoretical.

The post that made the quiet part loud

Earlier this week, I wrote a LinkedIn post about how designers get weird when a PM shows up with a prototype. The point wasn’t that the prototype was automatically good, or that everyone with a cursor and a dropdown menu is suddenly a product designer. It poked the bruise.

A PM brings a prototype. An engineer suggests a flow. Someone outside design has strong opinions about spacing, UX, and “how the screen should work.” And suddenly the room gets tense because it feels like design territory is being invaded.

But the post resonated because most designers know the uncomfortable truth hiding underneath that reaction. Our value was never supposed to be “I’m the only person allowed to suggest the solution.” That’s a fragile moat. If your entire value depends on being the only person who can open Figma, AI and vibe coding are going to make your week emotionally complicated.

The actual value is knowing whether the solution is any good. Does the flow account for the messy parts? What happens outside the happy path? Does this solve the user’s problem or just make the roadmap feel productive? Are we about to spend three weeks polishing something nobody asked for?

That’s the part people skip when they reduce design to artifacts.

And this week, with the promotion, that point started to feel a lot more personal.

The title changed, but so did the standard

A promotion is weird because, on paper, it’s a title change. You update LinkedIn, people say nice things, you pretend to be normal about it, then you go back to your calendar full of meetings and browser tabs multiplying like rabbits.

But internally, it does shift something. Principal Product Designer isn’t just “senior designer, but shinier.” At least I don’t want it to be. For me, it’s a forcing function to think more about systems, leverage, and how design actually moves through a company.

Not just whether the screen looks good. Whether the idea survives contact with engineering. Whether the sales story is believable. Whether the workflow makes sense when the happy path starts falling apart. Whether the thing we designed can actually be built, tested, shipped, measured, and improved without everyone needing a priest and three alignment meetings.

That’s where my brain has been lately. Less design theater. More working software. More clarity. More momentum.

Which is exactly why one part of my workflow started to feel harder to defend.

Figma is still useful. Figma Make is where I start twitching

To be clear, I don’t think Figma is dead. That’s the kind of spicy LinkedIn take that gets engagement and slowly rots your brain. Figma is still great for craft, systems, polish, alignment, and helping teams see the same thing before they go build the wrong thing beautifully.

But Figma Make? For the kind of work I’m trying to do, it still feels like designing inside a very expensive slot machine. Sometimes it gives you magic. Sometimes it gives you hallucinated UI spaghetti. And either way, you’re paying for the privilege of arguing with it.

This week made that painfully obvious. I’m working through flows that need real states, real logic, real documents, real edge cases, and a prototype that can behave closer to the actual product. Fake UI only gets you so far before everyone starts pretending the thing is more real than it fucking is.

That’s why I’ve been doubling down on Cursor. I’m not trying to cosplay as an engineer. I’m trying to get closer to the actual product surface. I can prototype real flows, real states, real logic, and real failure cases instead of drawing the fifth version of a perfect screen where nobody has missing data, the API never fails, and every user politely follows the script.

That shift matters. Because the closer I get to the real product, the better the design decisions get. The questions change. The handoff changes. The conversation with engineering changes. You stop asking “does this look right?” and start asking “does this actually work?”

Annoying question. Better question.

And once I started asking that question at work, I made the mistake of asking it about my own business.

Then I looked at my own websites and felt personally attacked

The same mindset spilled into my own business this week. I’ve been moving both of my websites over to a GitHub and Vercel deployment. One is my portfolio website, which I’ve embarrassingly been running on WordPress for the last 10 years. The other is my newer site that was sitting in Webflow. I wanted more control, but the honest trigger was the cost. I looked at the yearly total and thought, why the hell am I paying for this?

By moving away from the bloated setup, I’m saving around $1,300/year.

That’s not “retire on a beach and become a mysterious linen shirt guy” money. But it is enough money to make you question how many small subscriptions are quietly sitting in your workflow like little raccoons eating your margins.

The bigger point isn’t just the savings. It’s ownership. I’d rather own the system than keep renting platforms, dragging boxes around, and pretending “design” ends at the mockup. At some point, the idea needs weight. It needs to exist somewhere other than inside a polished rectangle.

That’s the part I can’t unsee now.

Because once you see the cost of bloated tools in your own stack, you start seeing it in every designer workflow.

The work is changing, whether designers like it or not

I don’t think the future of design is designers abandoning craft and becoming full-time code goblins. That’s not the point. Taste still matters. Judgment still matters. The ability to frame a problem clearly still matters. If anything, those things matter more now because the execution layer is getting faster.

But if execution is getting faster, then hiding inside slow workflows gets harder to defend. Static screens still have a place, but they can’t be the entire job. Not when the real value is in understanding the system, shaping the experience, validating the logic, and helping the team move with more confidence.

That’s what this week clarified for me. The promotion is obviously meaningful. I’m grateful for it. I’m proud of it. I’m lucky to work in a place where I’ve been given trust, autonomy, and room to break shit in the name of finding better ways to work.

But the bigger lesson is that more responsibility requires better leverage. Better tools. Better systems. Better judgment around what deserves your time and what needs to be cut, automated, delegated, or rebuilt entirely.

This week, that looked like using Cursor instead of fighting Figma Make. It looked like moving a 10-year-old WordPress portfolio and a Webflow site to GitHub and Vercel. It also looked like finally admitting that a tool I loved three years ago might not fit the way I work anymore.

Which leads to the question designers don’t always want to ask out loud.

Ask this before your next renewal hits

Where in your workflow are you paying for convenience that no longer feels convenient? Where are you using a tool because it used to make sense, not because it still does? What part of your process makes you feel productive, but keeps you further away from the real product, the real customer, or the real business outcome?

That’s also the question Nick and I unpack in this week’s Design Table episode: if PMs can prototype, engineers can suggest flows, AI can generate screens, and designers can jump into code, what is the designer actually responsible for now?

And if you’re in the middle of that shift yourself, we also soft launched a couple of Design Table resources this week, including the Product Design Blueprint and our UX and Product Design Community, for designers who want to build better career leverage instead of just collecting more opinions about buttons.

That’s the stuff I’m looking at harder now. Every tool doesn’t need to be killed, but every tool should earn its seat.

The future of design isn’t less design. It’s more ownership.

And probably fewer subscription invoices quietly bleeding you dry in the background.

Till next week,