Flatter, Leaner, Inevitable: The Rise of the Player–Coach Designer
#029: How post-COVID corrections, collapsing middle management, and AI hype are forcing design careers into a new player–coach model — whether we’re ready or not.
As I’ve covered before, design careers are in flux. For years, the career ladder climb was straightforward: from individual contributor to manager to director+, with each rung representing less craft and more coordination. Today, that ladder is starting to collapse inward. What’s emerging instead is more of a player–coach model where leaders split their time between hands-on design and directing the work of others.
Perhaps unsurprising given the state of the economy, this isn’t just a design story. Across industries, companies are deliberately eliminating middle-management layers to cut costs and increase speed. A recent Wall Street Journal analysis (its headline — Your Boss Doesn’t Have Time to Talk to You — spiked my own guilt) noted that firms like Meta, Lyft, and Disney are shrinking the “managerial middle” to “move faster and reduce overhead.” Design orgs, often pressured to demonstrate ROI, are being forced to follow the same playbook.
The result: smaller teams, flatter structures, and greater expectations placed on each leader, and all of this is being accelerated by the rise of AI.
Why Now?
1. Tighter purse strings in the post-COVID era.
During the pandemic many tech companies went on unprecedented hiring sprees. Demand for digital products skyrocketed in e-commerce, streaming, delivery, and remote collaboration. Design and product teams grew rapidly to keep pace, sometimes doubling or tripling in size between 2020 and 2022.
But as growth slowed and economic conditions tightened, companies have started to course correct. Rising interest rates, reduced VC funding, and a sharper focus on profitability have pushed firms to cut back. Meta, Amazon, Google, and others all acknowledged in 2023–24 that their headcounts had outpaced sustainable growth. The result is what Business Insider recently called a shift to “fewer managers, flatter teams, and faster decisions.”
Design orgs mirror this broader correction. The surface area of work — multiple platforms, omnichannel journeys, personalization, AI integration — hasn’t shrunk, but the headcount supporting it has. That gap is being bridged by player–coach roles, which allow companies to run leaner while still maintaining standards of quality and pace.
2. The AI shift in craft.
AI has become the elephant in the room for every design team. Tools like Figma Make, MidJourney, or ChatGPT can generate layouts, copy, and even interface components in seconds. But that doesn’t mean the craft of design is being automated away. If anything, it creates new problems: low-quality outputs, biased recommendations, hallucinations, and designs that look good on the surface but collapse under real-world use.
Rather than celebrating AI as a replacement for designers, it’s more accurate to view it as a force that changes where the real work happens. Generation is the easy part; it’s editing, constraining, and evaluating that separate a good experience from a brittle one. Leaders must be prepared to direct their teams toward higher-order skills:
Editing — deciding what should be kept, discarded, or reworked from AI-generated output.
Constraints — embedding brand, accessibility, and ethical guardrails so systems don’t veer into harmful or incoherent directions.
Evaluation — building methods to test usefulness, accuracy, and impact, since AI-generated experiences can “feel right” but fail in practice.
In other words, the AI wave doesn’t remove the need for design craft; it makes the craft more complex. Instead of pixel-perfect screens, designers are now asked to shape prompt systems, evaluators, and content models that scale across contexts. Leaders who approach AI with uncritical optimism risk hollowing out their teams’ value. Leaders who meet it with a clear-eyed skepticism — and prepare their people for these new forms of craft — will be the ones who steer design into a sustainable role alongside AI.
3. The collapse of middle management.
Across industries, middle managers are being squeezed out as organizations pursue flatter structures. A recent Forbes article reported that middle management jobs accounted for a disproportionate share of recent white-collar layoffs, with many companies viewing these roles as costly layers that slow decision-making. Automation and AI have also played a role, taking on some of the coordination and reporting tasks that once justified a manager’s position.
For design orgs, this same logic applies. Roles once focused on approvals or coordination are being trimmed back in favor of leaders who are still in the work. Instead of a chain of managers relaying updates, organizations increasingly rely on “doer-leaders” who can span strategy, execution, and mentorship in a single role.
Enter the Evaluators
To understand why the player–coach role matters so much in an AI-driven workflow, you need to understand evaluators.
Evaluators are automated tests or frameworks that measure whether AI outputs meet the bar for usefulness, tone, safety, and brand consistency. They can range from lightweight rules (checking if an answer includes a disclaimer) to complex multi-metric models (scoring accuracy, bias, or customer sentiment).
For design teams, evaluators are quickly becoming the equivalent of QA for AI-driven experiences:
Consistency: Do generated UI elements or copy align with brand voice and accessibility standards?
Safety: Are recommendations free from bias or harmful suggestions?
Utility: Does the feature actually help the user complete their task?
Building and curating these evaluators is itself a design activity — one that demands taste, systems thinking, and ethical literacy. And because player–coaches are still hands-on, they’re often the ones writing prompt patterns, defining evaluator criteria, and teaching teams how to use them in practice. I plan to cover evaluators in more detail in future issues given their criticality and potential for mis-use.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Calling someone a “player–coach” without giving them time, authority, or scope is a recipe for burnout.
In many orgs, design ladders are reshaping into a three-track model:
System-ICs (Staff/Principal). Hands-on contributors focused on patterns, tokens, and coherence across experiences.
Player–Coaches (Leads, Manager). Splitting time between directing pods and shipping critical work.
Org Leaders (Director+). Fewer in number, focused on portfolio alignment, cross-functional capital, and talent health.
Instead of a designer moving away from craft as they climb, the expectation is now: stay close to the work, but expand your leverage with AI as one tool in your toolbox.
A typical player–coach week might include:
Framing product bets with PM/Eng on Monday.
Pairing with designers or engineers midweek to unblock a flow or prototype.
Reviewing evidence and deciding “ship, cut, or iterate” on Thursday.
Logging outcomes and updating patterns, prompts, or evaluators on Friday.
The artifacts that matter are no longer just Figma comps — they can include design tokens, evaluator dashboards, experiment readouts, and prompt libraries.
The Risks of Flattening
This shift isn’t without trade-offs. Eliminating layers can leave juniors stranded without mentorship. Calling someone a “player–coach” without giving them time, authority, or scope is a recipe for burnout. And if player–coaches end up doing all prioritization, they drift into shadow PM territory — papering over gaps in the product triad rather than strengthening it.
To make the model work, orgs need intentional systems: structured crits, pairing calendars, guilds, and mentorship frameworks. Otherwise, flattening creates fragility.
Where This Could Go
12–18 months: Player–coach becomes the default stepping stone to leadership. Staff and Principal ICs are expected to have fluency in AI evaluation systems.
3 years: Design engineering and AI design QA (red-teaming, evaluator coverage, outcome scorecards) are mainstream. Career ladders explicitly reward editing, orchestration, and decision quality, not just delivery volume.
As Julie Zhuo argues in The Making of a Manager, leadership isn’t a promotion — it’s a different craft. In today’s world, that craft looks more like orchestration than oversight.
Closing Thoughts
The evolution of design careers mirrors the pressures shaping companies at large: leaner teams, fewer layers, and more demand for leaders who can do and direct in the same breath. The player–coach isn’t a temporary stopgap—it’s the new normal. If the past era of design leadership was about scaling headcount and managing processes, the next one will be about scaling leverage: taste applied through systems, decisions grounded in evidence, and craft reframed for an AI-infused world.
For individual designers, this is both challenge and opportunity. The challenge is that expectations are higher and more complex than ever. The opportunity is that design has never been closer to the core levers of business — data, technology, and decision quality. The leaders who thrive won’t just manage work; they’ll shape the systems and narratives that determine how entire organizations design.
If you’re early in your career, start practicing now for the roles you’ll grow into. Learn how to frame decisions with evidence, not just pixels. Get comfortable reading data dashboards as easily as crit boards. Treat design systems, prompts, and evaluators as creative materials — not constraints. Most of all, practice editing and orchestration, because in the next era of design, those will be the highest forms of craft — whether we like it or not.