What I’m Seeing in UX Leadership Right Now
The shift is quiet but it’s real
UX leaders aren’t defending the value of design anymore.
They’re defending headcount.
I hear it in every cross-functional meeting my clients describe:
“What’s the minimum UX coverage we can get away with?”
Not “should we invest in UX?”
Not “what’s the ROI?”
Just this → how little can we staff this and still ship?
That’s not “just a budget” question.
That’s a power question.
And if you’re still answering it with research decks and usability metrics, you’ve already lost the game I wrote about here↴
Here’s what the numbers actually say
Industry-wide (2025 data):
UX Research postings dropped below 1,000 in early 2025 — down from thousands in 2022
21% of companies laid off UX researchers in 2025 (State of User Research Report)
Product/UX Design saw 26% layoff rates (the highest of all product disciplines)
February 2025 alone: 16,084 tech layoffs, reversing the stabilization from late 2024
My coaching clients (last 90-ish days):
2 out of 5 managing smaller teams, not bigger ones
4 out of 5 now report to Product, not a Design VP
All of them are spending more time justifying their team’s existence than doing the work
Nielsen Norman Group’s 2026 outlook calls it “stabilization” (but that’s corporate-speak for “the bleeding stopped, but we’re not hiring.”)
This is consolidation, not collapse.
Which means someone’s staying.
And someone’s getting cut.
The difference isn’t who has the best portfolio.
It’s who understood what I’ve been saying about organizational politics for the last year: craft doesn’t save you when budgets shrink!
Influence does.
The AI story many are getting wrong
Here’s what you’re hearing:
“AI is taking UX jobs.”
Here’s what’s actually happening:
Executives are using AI as cover to cut headcount they already wanted to cut.
Nielsen Norman Group’s 2026 report says it directly: “AI hype created a misleading narrative: that new tools could rapidly replace designers and researchers. That wasn’t true, but the story was convenient in a cost-cutting environment.”
Let me translate: AI didn’t eliminate your role.
Your VP used “AI efficiency” to justify the layoff they were planning anyway.
What AI actually did:
It killed starter tasks.
The wireframing.
The component assembly.
The basic usability analysis.
Everything a junior designer spent their first year doing, AI does it in 60 seconds.
Adobe’s 2025 data shows 59% of designers now use AI tools actively.
But here’s the part nobody mentions: only 1 in 3 teams are actually proud of what AI produces.
Because AI can’t do the hard part ↴
It can’t read a room.
It can’t translate user research into political capital.
It can’t make a CFO care about accessibility.
Here’s the actual risk:
NN/g says it clearly: “If you’re just slapping together components from a design system, you’re already replaceable by AI.”
The designers who are vulnerable aren’t the ones AI replaced.
They’re the ones who never learned to do what AI can’t.
The people staying employed right now?
They’re not better at Figma.
They’re better at making executives understand why a design decision matters to quarterly revenue.
AI just made that distinction obvious faster than anyone expected.
What the people who are staying are doing differently ↴
They stopped talking like designers.
Old framing:
“The research shows users prefer—”
New framing:
“This decision creates margin risk because—”
It’s not prettier.
It’s not more inspiring.
But when a VP of Product has to choose between two directors and one speaks CFO and one speaks Figma?
The CFO-speaker wins.
Every time.
Most designers think they need to learn business strategy.
They don’t.
They need to learn how to translate the work they’re already doing into the language executives already use.
The State of UX 2025 report confirms what I’ve been seeing: “Designers spend most of their day in meetings talking about everything other than design, getting ‘stakeholder alignment’ and ‘balancing user and business needs.’”
That’s not a bug.
That’s the job now.
And if you’re not fluent in that language, you’re out.
I wrote about this exact dynamic in The Strategic Authority Framework — most designers think their job is making things usable. The ones getting promoted understand their job is making business risk legible to people who don’t understand design.
AI just made that gap impossible to hide.
What this means for your next 90 days
🛑 Stop collecting design deliverables.
🟢 Start collecting decision summaries.
Not:
“Shipped 3 prototypes, ran 12 user interviews”
Instead:
“Influenced product roadmap to deprioritize Feature X, preventing 6-month engineering investment in direction user data showed would tank activation”
This is what I call influence through compression → your ability to make ambiguous design work legible to people who control budgets.
If you don’t know how to document this, I built The Brag Sheet Career Documentation System specifically for this problem. It’s designed for leaders who need to prove impact to people who don’t understand design and don’t have time to learn.
Because here’s what nobody tells you: when executives are deciding who stays, they’re not reviewing portfolios.
They’re asking: “Who makes my job easier?”
Not: “Who’s the best designer?”
I covered this exact dynamic in Leadership Cheat Code: How to Build Influence Without Formal Authority — the directors who survive budget cuts aren’t the ones with the most talent. They’re the ones other leaders can’t afford to lose.
Why this matters more than you think
We’re entering a phase where design influence is shrinking.
Not because design doesn’t matter, but because design lost the “political game”!
Nielsen Norman Group’s research shows the majority of design teams now report to Product, NOT Design leadership.
That’s not an org chart detail.
That’s a power transfer.
When you report to Product, Product sets your priorities.
Product defines your success metrics.
Product decides if you’re strategic or “just” executing.
The leaders who survive this aren’t better designers.
They’re better translators.
They understand that in a shrinking market, being right doesn’t matter if you can’t make the right people care.
I’ve been writing about this for months in my Political Intelligence Playbook — the idea that senior design success isn’t about craft anymore. It’s about understanding how decisions actually get made when you’re not in the room.
If you’re still optimizing for craft and hoping someone notices, you’re playing a game that already ended.
You can’t out-execute AI on production tasks.
But you can out-think it on strategy.
The leaders who survive aren’t competing with AI, but using it to do the tedious work faster so they can spend more time on the work AI can’t touch:
Translating design decisions into business outcomes
Building influence across functions that don’t report to them
Making complexity simple for executives who don’t care about craft
👉 What to do
📅 This week:
Document every decision your work influenced in the last quarter
Rewrite at least one recent project summary in business language
Identify which executives control your budget and learn what keeps them up at night
🗓️ This month:
Build your decision summary practice
Stop saying “users” in exec meetings. Start saying “activation risk” or “retention impact”
Watch who gets promoted and reverse-engineer what made them indispensable
🗓️ This quarter:
Make yourself the person leadership calls when they need complexity translated
Position yourself as the interpreter between Product, Engineering, and the CEO’s actual priorities
Accept that the job changed, and either adapt or get comfortable being “too craft-focused for leadership”
Because right now?
The people getting promoted aren’t the ones waiting for design to matter again.
They’re the ones who already learned the new game.
Sources: UXPA Salary Survey, State of User Research 2025, UX Job Market Analysis, State of UX 2025, NN/g State of UX 2026, NN/g Design Team Research, Adobe AI Survey, personal coaching observations Q4 2025
Talk soon,
If this topic resonated, here’s something practical: track the moments you catch yourself course-correcting, reframing, or spotting the real problem behind the noise.
That’s the kind of quiet judgment that compounds over time…but only if you capture it.
My Brag Sheet Career Transformation System helps you collect your thoughts, decisions, and micro-wins that turn into credible, repeatable content AND stronger performance narratives. Grab it and start using it this week!
📌 Stay Sharp Between Issues
→ LinkedIn — tactical influence plays, posted almost daily at ~8:00 AM EST.
→ My book — practical mentorship frameworks for senior UXers.
Id love to read "Leadership Cheat Code: How to Build Influence Without Formal Authority" but the link doesn't work :(
It's interesting that the core ideas from this article were referenced during the course I took at NN/g on "Becoming a UX Executive" with Nancy Dickenson. Thanks Marina!