The Judgment Gap

There's a gap opening in product organizations that's going to be expensive to close, and most leaders won't see it until it's too late.

It started with the UX design function being deprioritized, followed by blurred responsibilities across product teams and, eventually, layoffs across UX. On paper, the reasoning made sense: AI was automating the visible parts of design work, including the screens, prototypes, and wireframes leaders had always pointed to when asking what design was doing. If tools could produce those artifacts faster and more cheaply than people could, the cost calculation looked simple.

The trouble is that the visible parts of design work were never where its real value lived.

That value came from the strategic work: a set of questions that a screen can't answer on its own. Is this feature actually solving a user problem, or are we building it because a competitor shipped one? Is a forty percent drop-off in this flow a UI issue, or is it a signal that the product is positioned wrong? Where in the customer journey does trust break, and what does that cost us in retention, support load, and reputation twelve months from now? These are judgment calls. They require someone with institutional memory, real relationships with users over time, and enough standing in the room for the question to land before the decision is already made.

The NNG State of UX 2026 report puts it plainly: the practitioners who will thrive are the ones who treat UX as strategic problem-solving rather than the production of deliverables. That framing has been circulating in design leadership circles for a decade, but it lands differently now because the production layer is what got cut, while the strategic layer is what everyone is quietly realizing they still need.

The uncomfortable truth is that the value was always in the judgment, and the deliverables were just proof that someone was doing the work. When AI produces those deliverables more cheaply and quickly, what gets exposed isn't that UX wasn't valuable. It's that many executives never quite understood what they were paying for, and now they're finding out in real time.

If you're in a leadership role right now, this is the moment to get clear on what your design function is actually for inside your organization. If the answer is screens, keep cutting. The tools will handle it. If the answer is judgment about what's worth building and why, you probably need to rebuild, not trim.