---
title: "On shifting roles"
description: "These days I go to doctors and tell them my diagnosis and my preferred course of treatment. I have become a design client 😄"
author: "Ghaith Ayadi"
site: "Verbatim"
collection: "Hokum"
url: "https://verbatim.ayadighaith.com/hokum/on-shifting-roles"
date: 2022-12-27
updated: 2026-09-16
---
# On shifting roles

These days I go to doctors and tell them my diagnosis and my preferred course of treatment. I have become a design client 😄

It's funny that they usually agree with me. They don't ask too many questions. They trust my googling skills. They understand that they probably aren't going to add much value in most cases.

Doctors used to have to figure out the diagnosis because It used to be difficult for patients to do it themselves because they didn't have supercomputers in their pockets. Plus, diseases are named in Latin to make them more inaccessible to people in agony.

You don't have to stand very far to see that the doctor's job is changing and doctors must change. You know who else needs to adapt? Product managers

I'll say that PMs should be designing most things. I think these roles must merge or otherwise be restructured. Most design is freaking easy nowadays and none of it is in Latin. PMs come to us with the problem and the solution because they are indeed designers. They just don't know that because nobody knows exactly what design is. They think it has to do with Post-it notes and Figma. That's like saying PMing is about sprints and backlogs.

Oh the Blasphemy....

I bet the honest PM tries to pretend like they don't know the answer just to not overstep on the designer's toes.

We still need dedicated designers like we need surgeons, dentists, and proctologists. But in a company that did its design homework, the time it takes a PM to write a ticket is usually enough to build it in High fidelity in Figma.

Designers don't want you to hear this too because we want you to think this stuff is complicated. Please... The complicated things never get braught up to begin with. You didn't know it existed.