The state of senior product designers in Hungary

Hitting a glass wall: thoughts on career progression, AI influence, workflows, role transition.

For designers with ten, fifteen or more years of experience, the Hungarian job market feels strangely narrow.

You can become more experienced, capable and responsible, but not necessarily more senior in any formal sense. There are very few Lead Designer, Design Manager, Head of Design or Design Director positions to fill. Sometimes, for extended periods, there are no visible opportunities at all.

Job searching platforms do not show a healthy career ladder either for experienced designers. The market seems to offer junior and mid-level roles, a smaller number of senior positions and then a wall. Although, even senior roles are listed with a requirement of only 5 years of experience is nuts, if you ask me.

You know what’s the next level, but you just can’t reach it.

Probably this is not only a Hungarian problem, but Hungary makes it especially painful.

Many Hungarian or Hungary based companies don’t build independent product organizations. They only operate as delivery centres, shared-service centres, outsourcing companies or local branches of international corporations. Product strategy, design leadership and budgets often remain somewhere else.

In these organizations, designers are expected to execute within an existing system and hierarchy. They may have significant responsibility, but not necessarily significant authority.

A designer may own a feature, a product area or even an entire application (which is super rare), but that does not automatically create a Manager or Director position. If there are only one or two designers in the local office, there is obviously no management ladder to climb.

There are other reasons too:

• Smaller companies (KKV in Hungarian) often need one generalist designer, not a design organization.
• Engineering leadership is easier to justify financially.
• Product management is often closer to business decisions.
• Design is still treated as a production function.
• Titles are sometimes used without giving people more scope or influence. (calling your sole designer Lead or Head of UX is just mental masturbation)
• Senior designers are expected to remain individual contributors indefinitely.
• Leadership positions are created at headquarters, not in Hungary.

This creates a glass wall rather than a glass ceiling.
A glass ceiling suggests that a path exists but someone is being prevented from reaching it. A glass wall is different, since you are just outside looking in, forever.

Seniority without progression

Many designers reach a strange professional position (stuck in mud) after reaching more than 10 years of experience: they are too skilled for ordinary execution work, but there are not enough opportunities to use their experience at an organizational level. Can’t play with the big boys.

They may be highly capable at product strategy, research, complex interaction design, design systems, design operations, mentoring, stakeholder management, product discovery, design leadership, etc. Yet the market still evaluates them mainly as people who produce screens…

When the designer becomes the person who makes a product usable, attractive and consistent, only after the important decisions on the solution have already been made is a dead end and a total misinterpretation of what the designer role is really about. In its core, it is about finding solutions to problems.

Increased responsibility of doing-what-you’re-told without a corresponding increase in authority is not career progression.

Of course, we have to talk about AI to get the full picture

AI does not solve Designer problems

AI is often presented as a way to make designers more productive, which is somewhat a true statement, but an incomplete one.

AI can help with research synthesis, content exploration, ideation, interface variations, prototyping, documentation and repetitive production work. It can make parts of the design process faster. On the other hand, when you spend hours on coming up with perfect prompts only for agents still producing massive hallucinations, faster is still debatable.

But if the organization only views design as production, AI simply makes the situation worse.

Until the company doesn’t ask: “How can designers help us make better product decisions?”

It asks: “How can we create more design output with fewer designers?”

This is the wrong question. And designers have been spending decades explaining their roles to organizations and people still do not get it.

The most vulnerable design work is output that can be described clearly and evaluated visually (tip of the iceberg):

• Basic UI compositions
• Component variations
• Early visual explorations
• Basic copywriting
• Low-complexity user flows

The more durable parts of the role are less visible (what people ignore, skip or don’t see):

• Defining the right problem
• Understanding user behaviour and context
• Evaluating whether a solution actually works
• Recognizing bad assumptions
• Connecting user needs with business goals
• Managing complexity
• Designing for accessibility
• Aligning product, engineering, business and compliance
• Taking responsibility for the consequences of a decision

This is the paradox of AI in design: it can produce a fairly convincing interface before anyone has decided whether the interface should exist!

The design role is changing

To keep up with technology and business expectations is not for designers to become faster at producing screens than AI, because that competition is already lost.

The opportunity is to become better at directing, evaluating, fixing and constraining AI-generated work.

A senior designer should be able to:

• Use AI to explore multiple directions quickly
• Read enough code to collaborate effectively with developers
• Recognize inaccessible or misleading generated interfaces
• Test assumptions instead of polishing them
• Define evaluation criteria for AI-generated solutions
• Design the behaviour of AI products, not just their interface
• Understand uncertainty, permissions, error states and user control
• Build reusable systems instead of producing one-off screens
• Explain why a generated solution should not be shipped

All this doesn’t mean every designer needs to become a frontend engineer. It means designers need enough technical fluency to participate in the new process without being pushed to the end of it.

Note: AI literacy is not the same as prompt engineering. It is the ability to decide when AI is useful, when it is dangerously mistaken and what quality looks like.

When developers create the prototype

First to all, there is nothing inherently wrong with developers vibe coding prototypes.

Code can be an excellent prototyping medium. A functional prototype can reveal technical constraints, interaction problems and implementation possibilities much earlier than static screens.

But, BUT! The problem begins when the prototype becomes the product direction.

So a developer describes an idea to an AI tool in order to create a working interface. Stakeholders see something that looks real. (It just looks real, it is fake, okay?) Then the designer is asked to make it usable, consistent, accessible and coherent. “We just need this in Figma, but prettier.”

At that point, the designer is no longer participating in product discovery. The designer is in agony and preparing to repair a decision that has already been made.

The process usually looks like this:

1. Someone has an idea (a business need).
2. Devs & AI generate a clickable interface.
3. Business stakeholders think it’s the real deal and become attached to it.
4. The designer is invited to improve on the visual design.
5. Usability, edge cases, content, accessibility and user needs appear late or just get completely neglected.
6. The team calls the result “iteration.” (without having a clue on what iteration actually means in agile)

This is not a design-led process, this is not even a common sense led project. It is a constant battle against effective and proven software development principles.

An interactive prototype is not evidence that the problem is important or it solves anything. It is not evidence that users understand it. It is not evidence that the workflow is useful. It is only evidence that something can be built quickly.

Prototypes supposed to help us learn about the problem and possible solutions to it.

Questions to readers

Where can (Hungarian) experienced designers go?

My solution is working remotely to international corporations, which often keeps me stuck on a delivery level, doesn’t matter the experience.

What is the future for (Hungarian) designers if the career ladder is not long enough or broken?

Waiting for the Hungarian market to create a large number of Design Director positions is unlikely to be a reliable strategy in my opinion.

The state of senior product designers in Hungary was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.