How to become a 10x designer with AI
Five framework to speed up your craft & thinking as a designer with AI
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Friends,
I’ve always been captivated by how designers adapt to new tools and trends to amplify their impact. What started as a simple curiosity about the evolving role of design has grown into a deeper exploration of how AI is reshaping the creative landscape.🙏 Today, I’m thrilled to invite Nishant, former Lead Designer at Salesforce, to share insights on what it means to be a “10x Designer.”
The findings are both inspiring and thought-provoking. We’re witnessing AI not just enhancing creativity but redefining workflows, challenging traditional design paradigms, and unlocking once unimaginable possibilities.
To bring this vision to life, I collaborated with some of the brightest minds in design and technology—each offering unique perspectives on how AI empowers designers to achieve more with less. Together, we’ll explore how these shifts are shaping the future of design as we know it.
Let’s dive in. 🔽
Nishant Panchal is a visionary designer passionate about launching industry-transforming products. His portfolio includes developing AI agents for revolutionizing audit processes and pioneering global business credit management at Brex. With experience in AI-driven projects, such as using reinforcement learning for marketing asset personalization at Salesforce, Nishant has consistently pushed boundaries in the design and product space. He integrates AI-first tools into his design processes, scaling impact for businesses and users alike. Nishant aims to share insights on elevating design in the AI era, exploring how technology can redefine the possibilities of design itself.
You can follow Nishant on LinkedIn or X.
The concept of the 10x Engineer is well established—a rare individual who builds products with incredible speed and efficiency, someone whose output dwarfs that of their peers.
Their technical expertise, strategic insight, and mastery of tools allow them to focus their energy on solving high-impact problems. Their strength lies in identifying opportunities where others see limitations and channeling their efforts toward creating outsized value.
But what about design? For years, the design process has been constrained by the limitations of tools and workflows that required designers to make trade-offs between craftsmanship and scale. Tools like Photoshop and After Effects, while groundbreaking in their time, demanded steep learning curves and significant manual effort, slowing down collaboration and iteration. The process of turning vision into tangible outcomes often felt fragmented and labor-intensive.
Rise of the 10x Designer
With the rise of GenAI and Large Language Model (LLM)-based tools, the constraints that once defined design workflows are rapidly dissolving. This is the era of the 10x Designer—a multidisciplinary professional who amplifies their impact across the entire design process, driving value for their team, product, and organization. The 10x Designer embodies a fusion of creativity and computation, leveraging AI not only to enhance efficiency but to unlock entirely new possibilities for innovation and scale.
The design field is in critical need of 10x Designers—professionals capable of not only envisioning innovative futures but also executing their realization with precision and impact. Designers fought their way to have a seat at the table; now is the time to scale the impact we can have. This article delves into the defining attributes of the 10x Designer, offering detailed insights and practical examples to guide your development in this transformative role.
In this article, we'll explore three key areas that define the 10x Designer:
Think it. Build it. - Learn how modern tools and AI are enabling designers to move beyond static mockups to create functional prototypes and MVPs faster than ever before.
Should Designers Code? No, they should prompt. - Focus on understanding code principles and use AI-assisted coding tools to generate functional components enhancing collaboration with developers.
Scale Your Process. Scale Yourself. - Discover how to leverage AI across every aspect of the design process, from research to prototyping, to multiply your impact and effectiveness.
The New Economy - Explore how designers are capitalizing on AI-driven opportunities to create new revenue streams and shape the future of design.
From Operator to Orchestrator: The Future of Design - Transformation of the designer's role from manual executioner to AI-empowered creative director who guides and refines AI outputs while maintaining strategic oversight.
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Guide 1: Think it. Build it.
Who among us hasn’t relied on "lorem ipsum" placeholders in our designs? Yet, this once-common practice feels outdated in an era where Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) can now transcend static wireframes and evolve into fully functional applications with just a prompt. Advanced tools such as V0 and Replit empower designers and developers alike to conceptualize, deploy, and launch operational MVPs directly into the world. The trajectory of the industry is unmistakable: we are moving toward real, dynamic MVPs, sometimes bypassing design tools like Figma entirely.
This evolution, however, doesn’t diminish the designer’s role; rather, it redefines it. Designers remain essential in shaping, refining, and realizing the final product. What makes this shift exciting is the opportunity to embrace emerging tools that allow us to bring ideas to fruition earlier, embedding them seamlessly into an adaptive design process.
At the core of a designer’s craft lies the ability to translate subconscious visions into tangible realities. Realizing these visions requires a designer’s skills and mastery of diverse tools and techniques to align seamlessly with their creative ambition. When conventional tools fall short within unexplored creative territories, designers must step up to develop custom applications tailored to their unique needs. This pursuit of realism extends beyond aesthetics; it ensures alignment with how users will engage with products in real-world contexts.
I experienced this firsthand while prototyping Fieldguide’s AI Agent functionality to run demos for $1M+ deals, it became evident that traditional prototyping tools could not adequately capture the dynamic, streaming animations integral to our AI workflows.
Turning to AI-driven tools like Cursor, I revisited and expanded my coding expertise. Cursor’s prompt-first methodology—which relies on intuitive, plain-English commands—made the process accessible. Admittedly, there was an initial investment in understanding the Figma API and structuring prototypes at scale, but the results were undeniable: the storytelling improved dramatically, and the enhanced prototypes directly contributed to closing major deals. You can try the StreamText AI Figma Plugin yourself.
Identifying inefficiencies and proactively addressing them led me to create additional tools to streamline my workflow. Tasks like editing interactions across multiple frames or selecting similar components for bulk edits often slowed me down. To address these challenges, I developed two Figma plugins: Bulk Interaction Updater and Select Matching Layers. Both started as solutions to specific pain points and have since become indispensable, saving countless hours and significantly enhancing my design process.
Guide 2: Scale Your Process. Scale Yourself.
The contemporary Product Designer embodies a dynamic and multifaceted role that integrates visual design, user research, UX, prototyping, and storytelling into a cohesive practice. Designers are tasked with crafting seamless user workflows, design engaging micro-interactions, and push creative boundaries—all while contributing to product strategy. With the advent of GenAI , designers can amplify their capabilities across every facet of the design process.
Here’s how AI is transforming design workflows:
Step 1 → User Research and Discovery
LLMs offer unparalleled capabilities for analyzing large datasets, uncovering user behavior patterns, preferences and pain points. They enable designers to uncover nuanced patterns that manual analysis might overlook, providing a foundation for informed and strategic design decisions.
Suggested AI Workflow:
Integrate raw data from Gong calls, meeting notes, FigJam boards, or call recordings into platforms like Google’s Notebook LM for automated synthesis of key findings.
Transform synthesized insights into structured presentations using tools like PlusAI or Gamma.
Pro Tip: Develop Custom GPTs or Gemini Gems by uploading persona-specific resources. These personalized AI models can serve as virtual users, offering continuous feedback on demand and enabling rapid learning.
Step 2 → Domain Expertise and Product Research
Adapting to unfamiliar domains is essential for modern designers. LLMs act as knowledge repositories, delivering tailored, conversational insights that help designers quickly gain expertise.
Suggested AI Workflow:
Consult GenAI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for general queries, but achieve greater precision by creating custom GPTs modeled as domain experts.
Pro Tip: Prompt your GenAI Tool to generate a detailed instructional framework for crafting domain-specific custom GPTs. For instance, while designing auditing tools at Fieldguide, I utilized Claude to generate a prompt for creating a custom Gemini Gem tailored to auditing workflows. This bespoke AI has been instrumental in my iterative learning for the past 6 months.
Step 3 → Design and Prototyping
GenAI serves as a powerful ally in the ideation and prototyping phases, generating diverse design concepts. These AI-driven suggestions act as creative springboards, enabling designers to explore unconventional solutions.
Suggested AI Workflow: