Is the T-Shape Still Enough? A Designer's Honest Uncertainty About Skills in the AI Era

A Model That Has Served Us Well

The T-shaped skillset has been the north star of design careers for decades. Tim Brown at IDEO built entire hiring philosophies around it, and it traces even further back to McKinsey's work in the early 1990s. The concept is simple: one deep vertical representing your craft and genuine mastery, paired with a wide horizontal of cross-functional empathy and awareness. The idea being that great designers do not just design. They understand the world their work lives in.

For a long time, that model worked beautifully.

A designer who understood their craft and could also speak to engineers, researchers, and product managers was rare. That rarity had real value. The horizontal bar of the T was the thing that made designers trusted collaborators rather than isolated executors.

But something feels like it is shifting. And I am not entirely sure what to make of it yet.

The Question AI is Quietly Raising

As AI tools become better at producing first drafts, synthesizing research, and generating visual directions, I keep returning to the same uncomfortable question: is the horizontal bar of the T losing its edge?

Not because empathy and collaboration matter less. They do not. But because surface-level fluency across disciplines, which is what the T's breadth has always represented, feels easier to approximate now. With the right tools and a few well-constructed prompts, almost anyone can "speak designer" without being one. A product manager can generate a wireframe. A marketer can produce a moodboard. A developer can mock up a user flow.

So if breadth is becoming easier to fake, does depth become the only thing that truly differentiates us?

And if so, is one vertical deep enough anymore?

The Case for Growing a Second Spike

This is where the Pi model keeps surfacing in conversations I am having with other designers.

The idea is straightforward. Instead of one deep spike of expertise, you develop two. Two areas you can genuinely own, not just contribute to. For designers, that might mean pairing craft with research mastery, or interaction design with a deep understanding of AI systems, or visual design with strategy and business thinking.

On paper, it sounds compelling. Two verticals connected by a broad base of collaboration feels resilient. Hard to replace. Genuinely multidimensional. A Pi-shaped designer is not someone who knows a little about everything. They are someone who knows a lot about two things, and has the judgment to connect them in ways a specialist cannot.

The most promising second verticals I keep seeing come up for designers are: UX research done at a level of genuine rigor, design systems and operations thinking, AI fluency that goes beyond tool usage into informed direction and critique, and product strategy that translates design decisions into business language.

Each of these pairs naturally with a design foundation. Each of them is also genuinely hard to develop, which is part of the point.

But I Have Doubts Too

Here is where I want to be careful about overselling the Pi model, because I have real questions about it.

Is it realistic for most designers, or does it quietly become another form of pressure to do more with the same time and energy? Does chasing a second vertical risk diluting the first? And is this a model that works across all career stages, or mainly for mid-to-senior designers who already have one solid foundation to build from?

There is also something uncomfortable about the way these conversations can drift into productivity anxiety. The T-shape was never supposed to be a ceiling, but it also was not meant to be a source of inadequacy. I worry that jumping to Pi as the new standard might have the same effect if we are not careful.

What I Keep Coming Back To

The T-shape was never really about the shape. It was about a mindset: the willingness to go deep in your craft while staying genuinely curious about everything around it. The horizontal bar was always an expression of character as much as capability.

Maybe the Pi model is just the next expression of that same mindset, adapted for a more complex and AI-accelerated world. Or maybe we are overcomplicating it. Maybe the answer is not a new shape at all. Maybe it is just doing the slower, harder work of figuring out what only you c

an bring to a room, and protecting that relentlessly regardless of what the tools around you are doing.

I do not have a tidy conclusion here. But I think the question is worth sitting with rather than rushing to answer.

I Would Like to Hear What Others Are Seeing

Are you still building your T? Have you consciously started growing a second vertical? And if you have made that shift, did it actually change the way you work, or mainly the way you describe yourself?

I am putting this out as a genuine question rather than a position, because I think the design community is better served by honest conversation than by confident frameworks that arrive ahead of the evidence.

This article was written from a designer's perspective as part of an ongoing attempt to think clearly about career development in a fast-changing industry. Comments, disagreements, and lived experiences are all welcome.