When I joined FYERS, design ran like a relay race. A requirement came in. A UX designer picked it up, worked the structure and flows, then handed it to a UI designer to make it look finished, who handed it to development for the build.
Three roles, three handoffs, and at every handoff a little of the original intent quietly leaked out.
I've come to believe that split is a mistake, one the industry picked up and never really questioned. So I argued for a single Product Designer role: one person carrying a problem from user need all the way to a shipped screen. Here's the argument.
Handoffs are where intent dies
Every handoff is a translation, and every translation loses something. The UX designer knows why a flow is shaped the way it is: which edge case forced a step, which user fear a piece of copy is answering. Most of that context doesn't survive the handoff to the person making it "look right," who then hands an even thinner version to the person building it. By the time it ships, the screen is a copy of a copy of the original idea.
Collapse the roles and the context stops leaking, because it never leaves the one head that holds it.
The UX/UI divide was never real to the user
Users don't experience "the UX" and then "the UI." They experience one thing. The line between structure and surface is an internal convenience, not a truth about the product, and internal conveniences that add handoffs are exactly the ones worth deleting.
Good product design is structure and surface decided together, because they constantly affect each other.
Ownership changes how people work
When one person owns a problem end to end, something shifts beyond the org chart. It's clear who owns what; there's no "that was the other role's call." The work hangs together better, because the same judgement runs through structure, surface and behaviour. And people care more, because it is clearly theirs.
It also pairs naturally with building. Once you own the problem through to UI, owning it through to the shipped front-end, increasingly with AI's help, is one more seam to close, not a new specialist to hand off to.
The objections, and my answers
"You lose deep expertise." Some, at the edges, and you win it back in consistency and speed. Specialists still exist for the genuinely deep problems; every screen just stops paying the handoff tax.
"Not everyone can do both well." True before, less true now. The role pulls people toward becoming more complete designers, and that is the point.
"It doesn't scale." In my experience it scales better: less coordination, fewer handoffs to manage, and clearer ownership as the team grows. At FYERS, five designers now cover seven verticals this way.
The relay was serving the org chart
I joined as a UX Manager and became a Product Design Manager as this model took hold. My own title followed the same logic I was arguing for the team.
I'm not claiming the split never made sense. I'm saying that for most product work, one designer owning the whole problem produces better products, made faster, with less of the original idea lost along the way. The relay race was never serving the user. It was serving the org chart.