Why Design Is About to Become Everything

The technical barriers that used to protect companies for years have just evaporated. AI tools mean anyone can spin up a functional SaaS product over a weekend. No-code platforms let non-technical people build complex workflows. GitHub Copilot makes every developer exponentially faster.

Which means we’re about to see an explosion of products hitting the market. And most of them are going to die not because they don’t work, but because nobody cares how they feel.

Founders are still thinking about competitive moats the old way. They’re obsessing over features, trying to build the most sophisticated backend, racing to add AI capabilities. But they’re missing the thing that’s actually going to matter.

The companies that win over the next five years won’t be the ones with the best code. They’ll be the ones that make people feel something.

Think about the products you actually love using. Not the ones you think you should love, the ones that genuinely make you happy when you open them. Airbnb didn’t win because they had better booking technology than hotels. They won because they made travel feel like adventure instead of transaction. Stripe didn’t beat PayPal on payment processing capabilities. They won because they made accepting payments feel elegant instead of painful.

This is showing up everywhere now that building has gotten so accessible. There are startups with identical functionality, using the same AI APIs, solving the same problems. The only difference is how they feel to use. And that difference is determining who gets users, who gets funding, who gets acquired.

One company makes you smile when you use their product. The other feels like digital paperwork. Guess which one is scaling.

Great design has always mattered, but it used to be this nice-to-have thing you worried about after you figured out the technical challenges. Now the technical challenges are table stakes. When everyone can build, the only question left is: can you make people care?

The shift is happening in real time. Perfectly functional products with solid engineering teams are losing market share to competitors who just feel more delightful to use. The losing founders keep adding features, trying to win on capabilities, while their users drift away to products that make them feel something.

The founders who are getting this are flipping their entire approach. Instead of hiring engineers first and designers later, they’re building design-led teams from day one. Instead of treating aesthetics as polish, they’re treating emotional response as core product strategy.

When anyone can build anything, the products that break through aren’t the ones with the most features. They’re the ones that understand something fundamental about human behavior that their competitors missed.

Take Notion. They didn’t invent note-taking or project management or databases. They just made all of it feel like playing with digital Lego instead of filling out forms. That emotional difference built a billion-dollar company.

Or look at Linear. They’re competing in the most commoditized space in tech, project management tools. Jira has been around forever, everyone knows how to build this stuff. But Linear designed every interaction to feel fast and delightful instead of slow and bureaucratic. Engineers actually want to use their bug tracker. That’s design magic, not technical innovation.

The pattern is clear. The companies scaling fastest right now aren’t the ones with proprietary technology. They’re the ones that made design decisions early that are really hard to copy. You can reverse engineer an API, you can’t reverse engineer taste.

And taste is becoming the ultimate competitive advantage because it compounds. When people love using your product, they tell their friends. They become your marketing team. They stick around when competitors launch similar features because switching means giving up something that brings them joy.

The companies that don’t get this are about to get absolutely steamrolled. There are perfectly good products with solid engineering teams that are losing market share to competitors who just feel more delightful to use.

This is creating massive opportunities for people who understand that design isn’t about making things pretty. It’s about making things feel right. Companies are going to pay huge premiums for designers who can create emotional connections, for product leaders who understand that user experience is business strategy, for executives who can build culture around making people feel something.

The irony is that as building gets easier, the soft skills become the hard skills. Anyone can learn to code now. Not everyone can learn to create products that people love.

The hiring landscape is completely shifting. It’s not about finding the best engineers anymore, it’s about finding people who can make technology feel human. People who understand that in a world where everyone can build, the only way to win is to build something people actually want to live with.

Because at the end of the day, people don’t choose products based on feature lists. They choose based on how those products make them feel. And in a market where technical capability is commoditized, that feeling is everything.