Generalist vs Specialist in UX

The False Choice

The question isn't whether specialists or generalists win. The question is whether you can afford to keep waiting when the barriers to self-service have collapsed. At Uber, a designer waiting for analytics to run a SQL query would lose three days for what became a ten-minute task once she learned basic SQL with Claude's help. A PM stuck until engineering builds a prototype would lose a week for something he could spin up in an afternoon with Cursor.

The bottleneck in modern product development is no longer "can we build this," it's "should we build this," and answering that question requires fast iteration, not perfect documentation. A feature idea that used to take six weeks to specify can now be prototyped, tested with users, and either killed or refined in one week, and that compression is only possible when people can do baseline work across disciplines without waiting for specialists to execute every step.

What Design Becomes

Design systems already commoditized UI execution. What remains valuable is context, problem understanding, and creative arrangement of building blocks. Therefore, coding IS design when the designer is arranging functional components with the same design thinking they use to arrange visual components. Medium changes, thinking doesn't.

This applies across disciplines. Research becomes context-gathering plus AI-powered synthesis. Product management becomes vision-setting plus AI-powered execution. Engineering becomes architecture plus AI-powered implementation. The lens persists even as the execution medium expands.

The Reality of Role Consolidation

580,000+ tech positions eliminated 2022-2024. Many roles never returned. Companies are consolidating functions into whoever can execute fastest. The professionals advancing now aren't the ones protecting their specialty. They're the ones eliminating their own blockers, building capabilities that let them create value across multiple disciplines.

When roles consolidate and organizations restructure, the people who survive and thrive are rarely the ones who were most specialized in a single discipline. They're the ones who could create value across multiple areas and adapt when the environment changed.

Starting Point

If your goal is long-term leverage, keep your specialty and add adjacent capabilities where your team gets blocked: product framing, data fluency, prototyping, and AI workflows. Identify the three tasks you wait for most frequently, pick the one that costs you the most time, and learn just enough with AI assistance to handle the baseline version yourself.