Figma was the product design job for a decade. Ramp just made it step 4 of 5.
Look at how their product designers actually work now. Start in an LLM to frame the problem. Talk to users. Prototype the real thing with AI. Bring it into Figma. Then iterate against live behavior. The tool that defined the role since 2016 now sits second to last in the sequence.
Here's what designers haven't fully priced in. For years the craft was the moat. Producing something an engineer could actually build took real time, so whoever did it fastest and cleanest held the leverage. That bottleneck dissolved this year.
When a working interface takes minutes to generate, the hard question becomes which interface deserves to exist. That one has no shortcut. It needs taste, product judgment, and a real model of what good even means.
So the role splits in two. The making compresses into a single step. Taste and systems thinking expand into the whole job. The best designers now write the brief, set the standard, and catch the ten thousand outputs that are technically correct and completely wrong.
Designers at the frontier are already shipping PRs straight through Codex. Figma became the finisher. The real decisions happen upstream, in the LLM, the prototype, and the customer call.
Judgment was always the scarce part. It just spent years hiding inside the craft.
Full breakdown: news.aakashg.com/p/ai-produc…
Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta)
The product operating model is dead.
AI killed it. Here's what replaced it, with Rohan Varma (first PM at Cursor, now PM on Codex).
🔗: news.aakashg.com/p/ai-produc…
— https://nitter.net/aakashgupta/status/2067360449033637916#m