The Useful Definition of "Hard"
Figma product manager Nikolas Klein has spent years working on tools that help people create interactive experiences. The focus of that work has shifted as AI has changed the design landscape, but a central observation has remained consistent: while the tooling evolves rapidly, the underlying challenges of the work often stay remarkably similar.
Klein, a designer turned PM at the company since 2018, was long focused on building prototyping tools. After seven years of that work, the arrival of generative AI tools in earnest prompted a shift—not in what designers needed to accomplish, but in how tools could support them. The hardest parts of the job, he argues, are still the hard parts, regardless of the interface used to get there.
Skills That Persist
Klein has been vocal about the need to distinguish between tasks that AI can automate and the underlying competencies that remain necessary for good work. Technical skills like layout, typography, and tool proficiency can be increasingly supported or handled by AI systems. Yet the human elements—forming a point of view, making judgment calls, understanding context—remain core to producing meaningful work.
For prototyping specifically, which Klein worked on for most of his tenure at Figma, the value of AI lies not in removing the act of creation, but in shortening the distance between intent and result. By reducing the mechanics of setting up interactions, more time can be spent on evaluating whether an interaction actually feels right.
From Design to Decision
Klein has noted that working on the multi-edit feature and later on AI-powered creation tools has shifted how he sees product management. It no longer makes sense, he suggests, to frame the job as purely a design or purely a technical role. As the boundaries between designers, developers, and PMs blur, job titles become less reflective of daily work. What matters instead is the collaborative capacity of a team to identify the right problem to solve next.
