The Brief: Afraid of losing your job? Become irreplaceable

03/20/25 • 9 min

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Becoming an irreplaceable designer

By Aarron Walter

The software industry is in a tough contraction phase. Teams are downsizing, and companies are prioritizing efficiency. It’s a stressful time for many.

But it’s also an opportunity—to reflect on your work, your skills, and the unique value you bring as a designer. What could you do to make yourself indispensable to your team?

In my career, I’ve worked with a number of truly irreplaceable designers, and they all share a common trait: they became more than just a designer. They bring additional skills in coding, research, or business that expand their value, make them better cross-team collaborators, and help them solve problems more effectively.

Irreplaceable designers thrive in the blurry space between disciplines. They adapt their language and perspective as they work across teams, earning respect from their peers.

These designers are rare—but they shouldn’t be. AI is making it easier for all of us to bridge the gap between disciplines. While there’s a lot of excitement about how AI can help designers improve their craft, the real opportunity lies in designers learning to build as well.

Continue reading this issue of The Brief on Substack

Becoming an irreplaceable designer

By Aarron Walter

The software industry is in a tough contraction phase. Teams are downsizing, and companies are prioritizing efficiency. It’s a stressful time for many.

But it’s also an opportunity—to reflect on your work, your skills, and the unique value you bring as a designer. What could you do to make yourself indispensable to your team?

Irreplaceable designers thrive in the blurry space between disciplines. They adapt their language and perspective as they work across teams, earning respect from their peers.

Continue reading this issue of The Brief on Substack

Previous Episode

Trenton Doyle Hancock: An artist’s process for creating order from chaos

Visit our Substack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/trenton-doyle-hancock

Aarron’s friend Trenton Doyle Hancock did something remarkable when they were both in the graduate Painting and Drawing program at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia—he had work in the Whitney Biennial. It was a bit like winning an Oscar while in acting school, just not something that ever happens.

Most people are thrown by early success, but not Trenton. He pressed forward in his studio where he crafted epic stories in large scale paintings that later expanded into installations, sculptures, and performance art. His creative process is unique. Piles of collected objects, receipts, food wrappers, etc find their way into his work where their color, texture and attitude unfold as the fabric of Trenton’s universe of heroes, villains, and ancient mysteries.

We spoke with Trenton about his neurodivergent approach to the world, how collecting influences his visual sensibilities, and how chaos becomes precise order in his work. At the time of our recording, Trenton had a large show at the Jewish Museum in New York exploring intersecting themes in his work and that of Philip Guston.

Bio

For nearly two decades, Trenton Doyle Hancock has created a vivid, fantastical universe where autobiographical elements blend seamlessly with references to art history, comics, superheroes, and popular culture. Through paintings, drawings, and expansive installations, Hancock crafts complex narratives exploring themes of good versus evil, infused with personal symbolism and mythology. His work draws stylistically from artists like Hieronymus Bosch, Max Ernst, Henry Darger, Philip Guston, and R. Crumb, integrating text as both narrative driver and visual element. His distinctive storytelling has extended beyond gallery walls into performances, ballet collaborations such as Cult of Color: Call to Color with Ballet Austin, and murals at prominent public spaces including Dallas Cowboys Stadium and Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park.

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Next Episode

Heidi Trost: Human Centered Security

Visit our Substack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/heidi-trost

Designing a good security experience is hard. Every time we run into one of those security captchas that requires you to “identify all the motorcycles” in the tiled images, we want to give up and surrender to our robot overlords...or throw our laptop out the window.

Our guest today, Heidi Trost, just published a book called Human-Centered Security: How to Design Systems That Are Both Safe and Usable. In the book, Heidi aims to help people who are “tired of hearing things like ‘humans are the weakest link’ and instead want to focus on designing more secure, more resilient systems.”

In our conversation, we spoke with Heidi about the metrics we can use to measure the quality of the security experience, why the login/password recovery is so broken—even for companies that are good at UX design—and some ways to approach user testing for security.

Bio

Heidi Trost is a UX leader who helps cross-disciplinary teams improve the security user experience. With a background in UX research, Heidi does this by helping teams better understand the people they are designing for, as well as the security threats that may impact people and systems negatively. Heidi is also the host of the podcast, Human-Centered Security, where she interviews security experts and people who design for the security user experience.

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This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books, as well as our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show.

Upgrade to paid

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