How AI, metrics, and career anxiety are reshaping design

I was helping my direct report prepare her promotion packet when a leader said to the room, not to me:

“Promoting someone doesn’t mean they deserve it. They’ve earned it through performance and they now have more responsibilities to bear. Upwards and downwards.”

She heard encouragement. I heard a warning. Same words, same room, two different frequencies. That was the moment I realised the staircase isn’t broken. It’s just not the same object for everyone on it.

Prior to my current role, I had already reconsidered how I wanted to progress and moved into a different role in a different industry. Most people in my current workplace don’t know: the title on my internal profile doesn’t match the one in my head. That gap is not just personal. It’s structural. The design industry runs on a scorecard that measures what climbs easily and ignores what matters most.

Sometimes an ex-colleague calls me by my old title or assumes a scope I no longer have, and I don’t correct them. Not because I’m hiding, but because I’m not sure what the correction would be. This is what value capture feels like in real time: the compression of a complex self into a legible label.

Scorecards and games

Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen calls this “value capture”. Rich, complicated forms of worth get compressed into simple scores that are easier to track and optimise. The score becomes the goal. The original value disappears.

In design, this happens constantly. User delight becomes click-through rate. Ethical clarity turns into a compliance checklist. Visual craft follows adherence to the design system. So while each substitution feels reasonable, each one quietly kills something.

Nguyen’s example is rock climbing. People climb not to reach the top. If that were the point, they’d take a helicopter, but they climb for the embodied problem-solving, the flow and the struggle. Now, imagine sensors on the wall, global leaderboards, points for vertical speed. Suddenly the helicopter is the optimal strategy. The metric has flattened the activity into something unrecognisable.

The metric is flattening design in the same way. AI is the helicopter. It can reach the visual summit instantly. But if we measure design by how fast we get there, we destroy the thing that made climbing matter: judgement, restraint, and the decision about which route is worth taking.

The trap isn’t that AI can do our work. It’s that we’ve already agreed to define our work in ways that make the helicopter look like progress.

However, beyond design work, I feel this personally now. The gap between what my profile says and what I know about my role is a small, daily lesson in how scorecards flatten reality. I am still read as someone who climbed higher than I chose to. The scorecard others perceive doesn’t match my actual life. I haven’t decided whether that mismatch is a problem to solve or a condition to inhabit. But I notice it now.

What the stair promises

Molly Graham’s “corporate stairs” are the comfortable story: learn skills, get promoted, expand scope, repeat. It worked, more or less, for a long time. But the stairs assume the building isn’t changing shape.

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AI is changing the shape. The job of “senior designer” in 2027 may involve skills that don’t exist yet and omit skills that defined the role for decades. Planning a ten-year ascent assumes the steps will still be there. Unfortunately, that won’t be the case.

This is more than a career risk; it’s an identity risk. When your sense of self is tied to the steps on a stair, and the stair starts to crumble, the anxiety is existential. The thought won’t be “Will I get promoted?”, but it would be “Who am I if the path I planned no longer exists?”

I used to be one of the people who doubled down: more hours, more visibility and more alignment with whatever metric the company currently prized. Some get promoted. Almost none seem less anxious. The stairs offer movement without direction.

I didn’t fall off the stairs. I looked at it closely enough to see where it was headed, and I chose a different direction. But that direction is still unfolding. I’m still in the same building, but I’m seeing it differently now.

The Success That Hurts

Here’s what we don’t talk about: you can win by the old rules and still lose by measures that actually matter.

Psychologist Shawn Achor’s research on high performers is uncomfortable reading. Achievement and well-being are not the same curve. You can ship the feature, get the raise, earn the title, and wake up cynical, disconnected, and burnt out. Tech is full of people who optimised every proxy and missed the point.

I know this from the inside. I had the title and the scope, and I was performing well. But I was also managing a gap between what I was supposed to care about and what I actually cared about, and that management became its own exhausting work.

The hustle isn’t the problem. The problem is hustling toward a finish line that is not yours or toward one you chose long ago and have since outgrown.

Playing a Different Game

Nguyen offers a partial escape known as “playful agency”. Treat external scores as temporary tools rather than final verdicts. Keep a firewall between what the company measures and what you know to be true about good work.

This sounds abstract until you practise it. It means defending a slower decision because speed degrades trust, as well as killing a feature that would move a metric but violate the product’s coherence. Some of your best work will never appear on a dashboard, and you’re doing it anyway.

Playful agency is not rebellion. It’s not ignoring business needs. It’s maintaining the capacity to judge whether the business is asking the right questions.

David Epstein’s Range adds another layer. In complex, shifting environments, narrow specialization is a trap. What matters is breadth: the ability to frame problems across domains, to synthesize unfamiliar inputs, to tolerate uncertainty without premature resolution.

For designers, this means the response to AI is not “learn the new tools faster”. It’s “cultivate judgement that tools can’t replace”, leading to better framing, taste, and sense of what should exist and why. These are not competencies you acquire in a course. Instead, they emerge from messy, cross-domain experience.

Frances Hesselbein’s career is a masterclass in rejecting the corporate scorecard. She didn’t climb the traditional stairs. In fact, she began as a small-town housewife and local studio partner who reluctantly stepped up to lead a single volunteer troop. When she eventually became the organisation’s first-ever CEO hired directly from those volunteer ranks, she brought no conventional corporate playbook or legible industry labels with her. Instead of optimising for rigid corporate metrics, she managed by “playful agency”, dismantling top-down hierarchies, moving toward messy human problems that interested her, and letting action reveal her capacity. In an era where AI acts as a helicopter to reach the visual summit instantly, flattening jobs in real time, Hesselbein’s emergent, adaptive path proves that the ultimate professional defence isn’t a fixed title on a crumbling stairwell but a deeply cultivated human judgement.

I’m trying this now, in my own small way. I’m building range slowly, choosing problems that interest me over metrics that would look good on a review. This isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity in a field where AI rewrites the job description faster than any promotion cycle.

But here’s what I want to say to designers who can’t step back, who have rent, visas, and responsibilities I don’t pretend to share: range isn’t a career move. It’s a way of working inside whatever role you’re in.

The Parts That Stay Human

This mechanical flattening is exactly why the corporate scorecard feels so claustrophobic — it simply cannot register the parts of us that stay human. In his exhibition, The Life and Death of the Human Soul of Design, designer Pann Lim maps out eleven dimensions that flatly resist automation: structural anchors like ethical integrity, taste, cultural resonance, and presence.

AI possesses none of these. It doesn’t carry the weight of responsibility, nor does it understand why a specific design choice shifts frequencies depending on who is in the room. When we allow corporate scorecards to compress our value into legible labels, we essentially surrender to the machine’s playground. AI will always dominate the statistically safe, homogenised middle, but it cannot mimic the messy, defiant human judgement that decides which route is actually worth climbing.

This is not romanticism. It’s a practical observation about where value shifts when execution becomes cheap. If anyone can generate a thousand variants, the designer’s role becomes selection, direction, and ethical judgement. The work moves upstream, from making artefacts to deciding which artefacts should exist.

A film from China made this visible in a way no theory could. Niu Lai was animated by a mother and son over several years for virtually no money. The animation is crude by industry standards. Theatres lacked official posters; staff drew their own. It became a box office hit anyway, competing with polished blockbusters.

Audiences responded to aliveness to the extent that real people had put something real into the work. In a landscape saturated with algorithmic polish, imperfection became a signal of humanity. The film’s success doesn’t mean craft doesn’t matter. It means craft is not the only thing that matters.

The lesson for designers is uncomfortable: your most defensible asset may be the part of your work that is least efficient, least scalable, and least likely to show up in a metrics review.

What I’m Doing

I don’t have this figured out. I’m not offering a system.

What I’m trying is using AI to expand exploration, not to outsource judgement. Defending the parts of the work that create real value, such as framing problems, understanding users, evaluating trade-offs, and protecting coherence, while stopping the habit of defining myself only by titles and promotions.

The stairs are seductive because they offer clarity in an ambiguous world. However, somehow I’ve started to suspect that clarity is the problem. The more certain I am about where I’m headed, the less I notice whether the direction is still worth going.

I’m becoming more open to a career that looks less like a staircase and more like a series of experiments, some of which may not pay off in any visible way. This might be naive. It might be privilege talking, but I think the alternative of clinging to a definition of success that is already obsolete is worse.

The Question Underneath

The age of AI is not the end of design. It is the end of pretending that design value can be reduced to throughput alone.

Yet, the harder question is whether I’m willing to let go of the version of success that got me here. Not just strategically by adapting to stay relevant, but personally. What if thriving means something other than advancing? What if the work that matters most is the work that doesn’t scale, doesn’t promote, and doesn’t optimise?

I don’t know if I’ll stay in corporate work. I don’t know what I’d do instead. What I know is that I’m currently living two versions of myself. One that shows up in meetings and the other that questions whether the meeting is the right container for what I care about.

If you’re still climbing, I don’t know if you should stop. I know the staircase isn’t what it promises. I know the view from higher up isn’t the view you were imagining.

Maybe the work isn’t to find a better flight of stairs or to jump off a cliff but to notice which version of yourself is present while you’re climbing. To let the gap between profile and person become visible, even if only to you.

I’m still in the building. I’m still on the ground. And for now, the work of figuring that out is the work itself.

References

Adam Grant. (2026). How to challenge your self-limiting beliefs with Shawn Achor (transcript). TED Talks. Tedtalks. https://www.ted.com/podcasts/ted.com/podcasts/how-to-challenge-your-self-limiting-beliefs-with-shawn-achor-transcript

Epstein, D. (2020). RANGE : How generalists triumph in a specialized world. Macmillan.

Koh Ewe. (2026, August 17). Niu Lai: Movie that went viral for terrible animation becomes China box office hit. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g4r0mrmlpo

Nguyen, C. T. (2026). The score. Penguin Group.

Sofiana Ramli. (2026, August 3). Confront AI and creativity at this exhibition inside a bookstore. Time Out. Time Out Singapore. https://www.timeout.com/singapore/things-to-do/the-life-and-death-of-the-human-soul-of-design

TED. (2024, December 12). Forget the corporate ladder — Winners take risks | Molly Graham | TED [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amtBUvkweEA

Rethinking success beyond the corporate stairs in the world of design was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.