Becoming Design Engineer in 2026 ? Should I ?
I'm (M30) 7th year in tech and currently Product Design Manager (still trying to be as hands on as possible). Lately I've been thinking about how my future will play out and what I wanna do and I was pondering with the thought of becoming design engineer in the next 5 years. UI and motion/interaction design are my absolute strongest domains and I'm more than decent in UX ( but I do hate doing research, questioners etc. with my soul ). I do think that there is value in me learning how to build the very things that I design and hopefully one day closing the circle (design+FE+BE = product) and being able to create my own products or deliver value in different teams. I'm kinda worried of AI progression but also I see that now (with zero coding experience) I really cannot use AI to create quality product or understand complicated concepts like software architecture for example.
The other path that's interesting to me is leaning heavily into motion graphics and mastering AE for SaaS explainers, demos and such, but this feel much more restrictive and less long term value compared to be able to build my own designs.
What do you thing of going the design engineer path from pure product designer in 2026 ?