The Future of UX is Here, and it’s Full of Generalists

John Garvie is a Senior Design Manager at Uber. This article is an adaptation of his Co-Lab presentation, “We Are the Catalysts.”

Increased specialization inside product organizations is a thing of the past. We're shifting into a new era where resourceful generalists will thrive.

UX teams can catalyze a broader shift towards a resourceful generalist culture, and I’ll walk through how we can ignite this culture change in 4 acts.

Influential trends shaping UX going into 2025

Let’s start with where we are today. We all know that change is a constant in our busy lives, especially in tech. Today, the field of UX—similar to the evolution of other maturing fields—is experiencing an intense period of change and evolution.

Four dominant trends are driving this change, and I believe these trends will shape UX organizations for years to come.

Trend 1: Human-centered culture is no longer owned by UX

Over the last decade, countless business and product thought leaders have ingrained the idea that design thinking and human-centered approaches are valuable and worth using inside of broader business contexts.

These efforts have been so successful that almost all top business and undergrad programs now teach design thinking and user-centered approaches to product development and innovation. Even for those who haven’t attended business or design schools recently, this philosophy has been entrenched in the culture of most product organizations.

The result is a new generation of business executives, product managers, engineers, and entrepreneurs who know about, value, and use human-centered approaches. All this means is that human-centered culture is no longer owned solely by UX—the entire product organization now owns it.

Trend 2: Powerful playbooks will only get better

UX and product methodologies developed over a decade have been packaged into powerful playbooks—for example, Continuous Discovery by Teresa Torres or EMPOWERED by Marty Cagan. But there are countless others.

I see these kinds of playbooks only getting better and more widely available. Generalists will continue to pick up these playbooks to their benefit.

Trend 3: New tools, particularly AI-backed tools, will radically empower novices

GenAI is supercharging the development of new tools for novices. In addition to the ones we’re already familiar with, like ChatGPT and Midjourney, companies are building their own GenAI-powered UX and insights tools, which provide even more capability for any role.

This means that a subset of activities that would have previously required a specialist can now be answered by anyone in the product organization, radically empowering novices.

Trend 4: Roles and duties will continue to consolidate

Market conditions like high interest rates and business pressures for profitability will drive further organizational consolidation.

Backed by these other three trends, smaller organizations will increasingly achieve incredible outcomes. For example, Midjourney, with just 11 employees, is said to have generated hundreds of millions in revenue.

Fueled by these four trends, resourceful generalists will thrive inside the product organizations of today and tomorrow.

We are entering a new paradigm in which resourceful generalists will thrive. UX leaders must take note and respond.

Who exactly are resourceful generalists? They are…

• Adaptable and smart professionals
• Laser focused on increased productivity
• Inspired to solve challenges by any means necessary
• Often undeterred to work across roles and responsibilities

In today's and tomorrow's organizations, UX leaders will increasingly need to support and cultivate resourceful generalists.

We'll also need to purposefully build our teams to enable resourceful generalist cultures and modes of work. However, supporting these kinds of professionals means thinking about organizational design differently. We must enable a teaching, learning, and doing organization.

UX teams are the best-equipped teams in the product organization to lead this culture shift towards resourceful generalists.

I recognize that change is hard, especially culture change. However, UX teams are probably the most well-equipped to model and succeed in this new working method. This is because, in many respects, we've already built the backbone to support teaching, learning, and organization. Here's why…

We model teaching by allowing other roles to engage in self-service models with edges to limit risk—aka research and design democratization. For example, at Uber, we created self-service models for research and design based on a complexity and impact framework.

This enables other roles with lower-risk self-service work and gives us clear authority to own high-impact and complex projects, which is where we deliver the most value. Many other UX orgs have done the same.

We already support learning through our ability to evolve our teams and deliver impact across all product life cycle stages. At Uber, we've advanced our UX practices to help our product team do foundational vision work and execute it through concept and launch. Again, this is now a standard model for most UXers.

Finally, we've not been constrained by our traditional areas of specialization and have started working across roles and functions. As a quick anecdote, I changed my role at Uber nearly two years ago from UX research management to UX design management.

I made this change because designers are researchers, and researchers are designers. I wanted to tap into my potential as a generalist. We're seeing these kinds of shifts increasingly. UXers are expanding their roles by shaping strategy and roadmaps. We're writing PRDs, designing end-to-end solutions, coding prototypes, and more.

A push towards learning, teaching, and doing has already created a culture of resourceful generalists on our team.

Now is the time to ignite this culture within our teams and the entire product organization. We can do this through four acts:

1. Embody vulnerability by asking to learn from other roles

When we get blocked, we must empower our teams to request self-service tips and tools from other roles, just like they do with UX. We must ask other teams to formalize and resource their self-service approaches during planning.

2. Enable others to teach their generalist playbooks

This can start by leveraging internal knowledge with cross-functional teammates inside our organizations who have transitioned to other roles.

We can ask them to share about ways they transcended their roles and have them share resources. Next, we can move externally to bring in thought leaders, speakers, and cultural change agents.

3. Support doing by providing access to state-of-the-art tools and training

At Uber, we provide access to basic training. Lightweight ways for all roles to use these tools and regular training are key to enabling cross-role work with fewer blockers.

4. Reinforce and model adaptation across the product organization

We must continue to show our teams that movement and skill acquisition across roles is a supported cultural value. When we operate in this way, we open up our organizations to new modes of empowerment and productivity.

By activating these four acts, we create a resourceful generalist organization where anyone can advance their vision and creativity without being limited by unsupported knowledge gaps or constrained by another team’s bandwidth. We become leaner and more effective organizations, empowering individuals to make the impact they wish to see.

Wrapping it up

UX is the catalyst for moving towards resourceful generalist cultures. Now is the time to act by asking to learn, enabling teaching, supporting action, and reinforcing adaptation.

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