Role lines are blurring faster than titles can follow. A descriptor that can move first, plus a set of books on framing your focus area.
For 20 years my cocktail-party answer was some version of “I’m a product designer,” and for 20 years everyone knew roughly what that meant. Then a designer on my team called out something I’ve been thinking about ever since: how do you even introduce yourself anymore? His point was that design has watched its own lines get drawn and erased before, product design, content design, motion design, all splitting and reconverging, and the AI in Design study puts numbers on the current round: 65% of designers report taking on more product or engineering work, while 40% see the reverse, PMs and engineers contributing more to design. The old titles describe a smaller and smaller slice of the actual job.
The answer I’ve been using: “I build and maintain,” followed by the specific thing you take care of. So a general intro for me might be, “I’m Leonardo and I build and maintain Design Teams”, while a more specific one could be, “I build and maintain clinical software”.
“Build” covers the front half of the craft, discovery through all the iterations to shipping. “Maintain” covers the half we never put in a title: listening to the people who use the thing, catching what you got wrong, and going back in to fix it. Say “I build and maintain billing for clinicians who take insurance” and you’ve told someone your craft, your domain, and your standard of care in one breath.
‘Build and maintain’ covers the half of the job we never put in a title.
4 books I keep pulling off the shelf for the “maintain” half.
The shelf
I’m not forcing a title on anyone, and I don’t think anyone should. Titles carry identity and market value, and this will move at a different speed at every company: the same study found only 28% of companies have made formal updates to evaluation, comp, or hiring, even as 73% of designers feel expectations rising. That gap is uncomfortable and it’s also an opening, because a descriptor can move first, in how we write job postings, frame promo cases, and introduce ourselves, long before the org chart catches up. I’m starting to recognize the descriptor as the leading indicator: when “build and maintain” stops sounding strange at the party, the titles will already be halfway there.