BUSINESS
Developments · · 2 min read · Source: Lenny's Newsletter
Design openings hit a record low. The market wants deciders
Open product design roles in tech are at their lowest since tracking began, while product manager openings are at a near four-year high. That's not a design crisis. It's a signal about which work AI takes over and which it doesn't.
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If you draw, fewer companies are looking for you right now. If you decide what gets drawn, more are. That's the short version of Lenny Rachitsky's new job market report from November 10, and I think marketing teams should read it more closely than product teams.
The numbers
The report combines two data sets: TrueUp for open tech roles across more than 9,000 companies worldwide, and Live Data Technologies for actual US hiring. From the free part:
- Design: about 1,900 open product design roles worldwide, the lowest since tracking began, down 28% year over year. US companies hired about 12,600 product designers in twelve months, versus 27,600 in 2022.
- UX research: about 1,800 US hires in the past year, down 66% from 2022.
- Product management: open PM roles at their highest in nearly four years, up 75% from the March 2023 low. There are now 3.8 open PM roles per open design role, up from 1.9 in early 2023.
- Skills: "LLM" is the most mentioned term in PM job descriptions. For designers, Claude has been the second most mentioned skill since spring 2026.
The jobs aren't gone. They're being unbundled
To me that's the real story. A design job has two halves: judgment (what should the product do, for whom, and why) and execution (screens, variants, prototypes). Tools are making the second half cheap, and Claude climbing the designer skill list fits that. Companies seem to be getting the first half from product managers.
My rule of thumb: keep in-house what needs judgment, context and accountability. Send out, or hand to the machine, what can be clearly briefed and measured. The report shows exactly that line, just in job postings instead of org charts.
Why this is a marketing story
To be clear: the report has no marketing data, and it measures the tech market, mostly in the US. But I know the pattern from marketing. Execution moves to tools, freelancers and agencies, while the role that owns positioning, budget and sign-off grows. AI is the ticket in, not the job. Anyone on your team who only produces is standing in the same wind as those designers.
What I'd do now
- → Split every role on the team into two columns: judgment and execution. Honestly, in hours per week.
- → For the execution column, check what tools already handle today, and put the freed-up time deliberately into the judgment column.
- → In your next job posting, don't ask for tool skills. Ask which decisions the person will own.
Bottom line: the market no longer pays for making things, it pays for deciding what gets made.
Key facts
- According to Lenny's Newsletter (November 10, 2026, TrueUp data), there are about 1,900 open product design roles worldwide, the lowest since tracking began and 28% fewer than a year ago.
- Open product manager roles are 75% above the March 2023 low; there are 3.8 open PM roles per open design role (early 2023: 1.9).
- US companies hired about 12,600 product designers in twelve months versus 27,600 in 2022 (Live Data Technologies); the report contains no marketing data.
