It seems we have a problem.
For the past few months, I’ve been spending several hours a day on job search websites, and I’ve accumulated a lot of questions. One of them is about the boundaries of our profession and the rationality of some job requirements.

The issue lies in the blurry lines between professions in the Design Thinking family.

I don’t claim to provide a comprehensive analysis (this is just my personal experience) but for the most part, people enter Service Design from two main areas: design (traditional graphic design, interface design, web design, visual arts, etc.) and research (sociology, anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, and so on). As a result, the expertise and skill set each person brings to the table can vary significantly. Some are more deeply involved in research, planning, and conducting studies, while others focus more on visual communication and interfaces. These professionals often work differently, leaning towards different types of thinking: scientific or humanistic. The former tend to concentrate on research depth, repeatability, reliability, theoretical analysis, and behavioral interpretation, while the latter prioritize facilitation and visualization.

Of course, there’s no strict line here. There are people who combine a passion for research with exceptional skills in prototyping or visualization. But this already creates challenges for the market. People who use the same job title may actually have different approaches and strengths. I have a feeling this happens less frequently with drivers, programmers, system administrators, or chefs.

The situation with UX design is even more confusing. In job descriptions, “UX design” often really means interface graphic design, even though graphical interface design is a very advanced stage (in the iterative model) of a complex product design process.

As a result, companies often expect a UX designer to carry out the entire research phase — from gathering business and functional requirements (a task typically handled by a business analyst), verifying those through user research and prototyping, conducting various types of qualitative research, creating use cases, analyzing the product’s usage context, writing user stories and user flows — then based on all that, designing the graphical interface and validating it with the dev team in terms of feasibility. Even better if they have strong technical skills themselves, adapting designs to platform constraints and immediately jumping into layout and A/B testing.

Product designers, judging by some job descriptions, are people who mostly work on the design system and draw visuals in Adobe XD, Figma, and Sketch, as if the product consists only of a visual interface, not of functional requirements, information flows, tech stack, and other “uninteresting” elements.

A similar problem exists with UX/CX research. Typically, we divide research in the most basic way: qualitative and quantitative. Both can be used separately or together. However, with the growth of data analysis (what everyone used to call “big data,” though that term seems to be less common now), the line between traditional research (its planning, execution, and analysis) and data analysis, such as CRM data, in-app metrics tracking, and other digital data sources, has started to blur.

Some job postings in CX, for example, list responsibilities that are essentially in the domain of BI (business intelligence), requiring strong skills in databases, data lakes, advanced analytics, data cleaning, and quality control. In other words: SQL, Python, R, and a constantly evolving list of specialized tools.

If this is the case, it means a researcher is expected to plan and conduct in-depth interviews with one hand, uncovering customers’ implicit needs, and write SQL queries with the other.

I’d like to try to make sense of this issue.
Maybe this kind of overlap is normal for emergent professions, but it’s likely doing real harm to the market by creating unrealistic expectations, or simple misunderstandings, among employers and recruitment teams. It also demotivates candidates or forces them to exaggerate their skills and experience (or feel inadequate and doubt their professional value).

I do believe that true generalists exist. Some people really can excel at everything. But chances are, you can’t afford them. Or your challenges won’t be interesting enough for them.

Design Thinking is about bringing the designer’s approach into solving product, industrial, and service challenges, where “pure design” has never been the main part of the equation. In many cases, users were historically seen by engineers more as a problem than a source of insight, since engineering solutions were often technology-first rather than human-centered. At best, the discussion would be about ergonomics.

This gave rise to a snobbish “human error” culture, where the person was viewed as the weak link, the noise interfering with the ideal engineering system. RTFM, PEBKAC, and other WONTFIX: User error. I’ll write a separate post about that.

The main achievement of Service Design is shifting the focus from the product to the end user, who “hires” our product based on their needs, the context they are in, and the value they’re trying to get.

A service designer is not a visual artist or a programmer. It’s a professional with a specific product-centric worldview, someone who sees the world through empathy and genuine curiosity about context. A broker, a communicator, whose role is to find the delicate balance between user needs, technological feasibility, and business goals.

Their work is a mix of empathy and relentless curiosity, combined with methodical precision and a hunger for data.

In over 15 years of working within the service design methodology, I’ve participated in more than a hundred project and product teams, led CX and EX initiatives, and I’ve never had trouble finding a talented designer who could take my prototypes and quickly turn them into great mockups. Or a data analyst I could assign a complex CRM task to.

But finding people who can orchestrate this work — who can connect insights from qualitative research with data analytics and turn that into actionable input for both designers and system architects, while staying grounded in a holistic understanding of the user experience — those are much rarer.

I think it’s wrong that looking for a service designer or UX researcher often resembles searching for a Swiss Army knife: someone who can do everything at once.

Unfortunately, one reason for this may be our own inability to “sell” the value of service design to stakeholders.
Until we have a clear certification system in our profession, we have to take responsibility for this ourselves, demonstrating the value of our approach to the business over and over again, in a language it understands: P&L.