What critical thinking means for senior designers (and how to apply it)

Photo by Felicity Tai : https://www.pexels.com/photo/employees-on-a-conference-room-7964146/

“I feel really bad for our design Leader. We’ve all been using Claude design and Figma Make, and it’s really tough for him to justify things.”

This is what a VP of Product told me the other day, at a kid’s birthday party. We were casually chatting about work, and he could see that the design at his org was struggling.

Not in producing design work. Justifying their work.

This was a company embracing AI for survival. From Claude Code to Figma Make to Cursor across the org. They were churning out designs and laying off the design team in the same quarter.

But here was the wild thing: they knew the designs weren’t good. They knew the design debt was piling up faster than they could ship. Given the choice between fixing what was breaking and generating features that might get them acquired, they built new ones every time.

“At the very least, I wish we had someone to minimize these problems.” The VP said.

That’s the design responsibility that’s emerging. And it runs entirely on language.

A senior design leader I talked to recently has performed on stage as a classically trained musician. She has 2 decades in design, in companies you’d recognize.

But one problem ran through her whole career: presentation anxiety.

“My manager at the time was asking me, you know, what are you thinking about when you’re presenting? I just told her, I am thinking about how I can take that chair, break that window and jump into the river, calculating if I’ll survive or not.”

She’d done the user research. She knew what the right path forward was. But the words tangled up in her mind.

In the silence between knowing and saying, her brain started doing physics. The gap has been there for many designers. AI has just made it more costly.

I’m not writing from Silicon Valley’s frontier. I’m writing from where most designers actually live: companies that aren’t building AI but are buying it, deploying it, restructuring around it because they think they have to.

In those companies, the work is already changing shape. Engineers are auditing PRs that someone vibe-coded.

Designers are re-designing Figma Make mockups a PM generated over coffee. The center of gravity is shifting from making the artifact to evaluating it.

By the end of 2025, more than half of Figma’s biggest enterprise customers were building in Figma Make weekly. A quarter earlier, it was 30%.

More people than ever are taking a crack at design sketches, which means craft isn’t enough.

For many designers, the craft WAS the argument. Since people didn’t have a clear idea of what the final product would look like, they relied on you to generate your best ideas.

AI changed that. Now, even trust runs against you.

When an engineer looks at broken code that’s been vibe-coded, the org trusts them to fix it. A bug is a bug, and engineers still have final say.

Designers haven’t always had that, because everyone can design (or thinks they can). So when a PM says, “look, I made this in Figma Make, let’s ship it,” design’s answer can’t be “this won’t work.” Because it sounds like two opinions about a thing that already exists.

The thing that already exists usually wins.

You’re a senior designer, and you saw something created in Figma Make. You can see, in 3 seconds, that’s wrong. The information architecture is messed up. You can spot 2 places where users will get tripped up.

This is where critical thinking is supposed to kick in.

“Designers need critical thinking” is one of those phrases that gets thrown around a lot, so let’s explain what that means.

Critical thinking isn’t spotting the flaw. You already do that. Look at any Figma Make output, and you can feel in three seconds where it breaks.

The hero is doing too much. The CTA is louder than the decision it’s tied to. The hierarchy is composed but behaviorally incoherent.

That’s craft. You feel it.

Critical thinking is the next move. Translating that feeling into language that a non-designer can act on.

Because the artifact, the Figma Make screen, exists. You can click it. Your critique needs to be as tangible in people’s minds as it is in yours, or it loses.

Figma’s own 2025 AI report found that 78% of users say AI significantly enhances their efficiency. Only 32% say they can rely on the output. That gap is the job.

Critical thinking, operationally, is making your critique more concrete than the artifact you’re critiquing.

• “The banner is too big on the home page.” Probably gets ignored.

• “Do we want people to create an account or click on our banner? Because the banner is so big, it seems like we’ll drive traffic away from the ‘Create an Account’ button.”

That argument has a greater chance.

The root of both of these ideas is probably the same place: your taste as a designer. You know, at a glance, what is likely to be a usability problem or what’s likely to break.

But until you surface behavioral consequences, or the larger product/business outcome? You’ll be stuck justifying.

When you can do the translation, the fight is fair. Losing a fair fight is fine. You made your case, the org made its call, and you live to design another day. Losing the same fight every week because the language wasn’t there: that’s what causes designers to burn out, and people to question why you’re in the room.

Every screen has a path the user must take for it to do its job.

Onboarding step 2: see context, check this box, click next. Multi-page form: parse the field, fill it in, move on. Checkout: review, confirm, pay.

Most design pushback skips straight to what’s wrong: the banner is too big, the CTA is buried, the form field is confusing. You’re pointing at problems before establishing what success looks like.

The practice is to flip the order. In front of any AI-generated mockup, ask yourself two questions, in this order:

1. What’s the path the user has to take for this screen to do its job?

2. What’s competing with that path?

Everything you spot (the visual hierarchy, the information architecture, the friction) becomes an answer to question 2. But it only carries weight because you answered question 1 first.

You can practice this alone tonight. Open any product you use and ask the two questions. The room comes later.

The verbal version is shorter. When the Figma Make mockup goes up, ask: “What decision are we trying to get the user to make on this screen?” The PM has to answer in business language.

Once they do, you’re not arguing about the banner anymore. You’re arguing about whether the banner serves the decision. Craft and translation are on the same side.

The craft is still the work. The sentence after the craft is the job now.

Want to understand how to learn how to build critical thinking to accelerate your design career? I teach designers how to do this, with step-by-step frameworks. Book a call to learn more.