Roles and teams
Product designer
Also calledUX/UI designer, Digital product designer
A designer who owns the end-to-end experience of a product area, from understanding the problem through to checking what engineering built.
A product designer works on a specific part of a product, such as checkout or onboarding, and is responsible for the whole arc: framing the problem, research, flows, interface design, prototypes and making sure the shipped version matches the intent.
The title replaced the older split between UX designers (structure and flows) and UI designers (visual layer). In most teams today one person covers both, with specialists such as researchers and design systems designers added as the team grows.
It is the default unit of design capacity: when people talk about the ratio of designers to engineers, they usually mean product designers.
Common mistake
Using product designers as screen producers. When the partnership with product management is weak, the role shrinks to drawing what was already decided, which is the most common way a design hire under-returns.