Welcome to the Unicorn Circus of 2025

Every week, a new job posting makes the rounds that reads less like a role description and more like a fantasy novel. The company claims it is hiring a UX designer, but when you scan the bullet points, you realize they are asking for a research lead, a product strategist, a front-end developer, an AI prompt engineer, and someone to run design ops workshops on Fridays. The title says “designer” but the description says “circus performer.”

And the salary? Let us just say you will need to supplement it with a side hustle reselling vinyl on eBay.

This is the state of the job market right now. Companies are desperate to cut costs so they cram five roles into one and slap a trendy label on it. They want the “unicorn” who can do everything. But here is the dirty secret: unicorns do not exist. What they are really building is a burnout machine.

I have been in this field long enough to remember when a UX designer was expected to design. Research was handled by researchers. Engineers coded. Strategists mapped out business priorities. Each discipline was respected. When you put them together you built something worth shipping.

Now companies expect one person to do all of it. They are not just asking for wireframes and prototypes. They want end-to-end customer journeys, usability studies, front-end components that can go straight to production, and to keep things “cutting edge” they sprinkle in AI magic too. Because nothing says “serious design” like asking someone to master tools that did not even exist three years ago.

For context on why customer journey mapping is so critical, see Adobe’s breakdown of what a journey map actually achieves or SAS’s explanation of why journey mapping matters for retention and ROI.

And let us be clear. AI is still the shiny new toy in the room. Nobody at the top really knows what to do with it. Leadership sees demos, panics about disruption, and defaults to the same tired responses: consolidate roles, lay off staff, or hand the keys to product managers who suddenly think they are prompt engineers.

When AI becomes an excuse to shrink design teams you do not get leaner you get blind. Product managers are skilled at roadmaps and prioritization, but they are not a replacement for design craft. Giving them the AI keys to the car does not suddenly make them researchers or usability experts. It makes them overextended decision makers with even less grounding in user reality.

This shortcut does more than just dilute craft. It drives teams into potholes. You cannot automate judgment. You cannot shortcut empathy. And asking one person to cover the work of four others without something breaking is a recipe for disaster.

For a deeper dive on why shortcuts are so damaging, UX Collective wrote a piece on the risks of cutting corners in product development.

The False Economy of Cheap

The justification is always the same: budget constraints. “We cannot afford a researcher.” “We do not have funding for a developer.” “We will just roll it all into the designer role.”

What they never admit is that cheap hiring costs more. Burnout costs more. Turnover costs more. Products built without the right expertise cost far, far more. Every shortcut you take on the team side shows up multiplied in the customer experience.

One of the clearest examples is how companies blur titles. I have seen the same job description recycled for both a “Head of Design” and a “Lead Designer.” Those are inherently different roles that will attract completely different candidates. Yet the pay range stays the same, often $130K–$220K. Well, which do you want? A leader setting vision and managing a team, or an individual contributor in the trenches? Expecting both from the same description at the same pay is just another way of saying you have no idea what you actually need.

And when expectations are unclear, the result is predictable: mismatched hires, burned-out teams, and customers paying the price.

There is another cost here that gets less attention. These all-in-one roles are dead-ends for UX practitioners. When you are stretched across five disciplines, you never get the depth needed to go from builder to craftsman.

Craft comes from repetition, reflection, and refinement. A researcher who runs dozens of studies learns the nuance of human behavior. A designer who hones prototyping skills develops intuition for interaction. A developer who codes daily sharpens efficiency. But when you split a career across five partial roles, you stall growth in all of them.

Instead of mastery, you get surface-level survival skills. And when you try to move on to the next role, hiring managers will see a generalist resume without depth. It looks flexible on paper, but it blocks the path to real expertise.

My Prediction

Here is what will happen to the unicorn who takes the bait. They will be set up to fail. No one person can sustain the weight of five jobs. Eventually, deadlines slip, quality dips, and leadership labels them as “underperforming.” The role burns out the practitioner, and the business fails its customers in the process.

I have seen this cycle before. In 2008 during the financial crisis, designers were expected to become all-in-one utility players. Rates were slashed and job security evaporated. The same thing happened during the first year of the pandemic when companies leaned hard on “do everything” unicorns while cutting staff. I am now seeing postings with rates that seem pulled straight from those eras. History is repeating, but this time it feels even more exploitative because we know where it leads.

Imagine this: you, the UX designer, are responsible for shaping hundreds of thousands of customer interactions every single day. You are effectively on the hook for product trust, revenue flow, and brand loyalty. And yet you are being offered maybe fifteen to twenty dollars more per hour than a Starbucks barista. That is the level of disconnect between responsibility and compensation in these so-called unicorn roles.

As Nielsen Norman Group has long documented, the cost of bad UX compounds fast; lost trust, wasted development spend, and churn that is almost impossible to recover.

The pattern is predictable. Overburdened unicorns cannot carry the load, and the company ends up betraying the very customers it claims to serve.

Here is the irony. These same companies that claim they cannot afford proper teams will happily burn money patching problems later. They will scramble to fix churn, throw money at consultants, relaunch products that should have worked the first time. They will watch others who invested in specialized teams run circles around them.

It is not that they do not have money. It is that they do not value design as a discipline worth resourcing correctly. They see it as a checkbox. That is the real circus trick. Making people believe asking one person to juggle everything is “lean” when it is really just careless.

What Needs to Change

If companies want real innovation they need to stop treating design like a bargain bin and start treating it like the investment it is. That means:

• Hire for focus not fantasy. A designer designs. A researcher researches. A developer codes.

• Pay for the skill you need not the dream you cannot afford. If the budget is tight prioritize instead of overburdening one person.

• Stop chasing tools as silver bullets. AI will not save you from a bad process. Forcing someone to learn ten platforms just to show they can is not clever.

• Respect the craft. When every role is stretched too thin the product pays the price.

Step right up to the Unicorn Circus if you want. Just know the show ends the same way every time: with exhausted performers and disappointed audiences. Companies think they are saving money but all they are really buying is turnover and mediocrity.

The better path is obvious. Invest in the right people for the right jobs. Respect the expertise of each discipline. Because unicorns are not real but broken products are.

If you are a practitioner stuck in the Unicorn Circus and looking for a way forward, I mentor UX designers who want to sharpen their craft, build credible portfolios, and move from survival mode to mastery. Reach out if you are ready to invest in your growth instead of being trapped in someone else’s bad strategy.