The question
The series invites people with a public record in their field and puts the plain question to them. Mine was the plainest version of it: is it worth becoming a product designer. Not how to do the job well — whether to do it at all.
That question deserves better than the two answers usually on offer. One is the course advertisement: high demand, remote work, good salary, six months. The other is the fatalism that arrived with the current generation of tools: it is finished, the models will do it. Both are selling something, and neither describes the job.
A long-form conversation is the right place to say so. On a stage you have twenty minutes and you compress. Across a table you can be asked a follow-up you did not prepare for, and that is usually where the honest material is.
The honest answer
Yes, if what draws you is the part of the work nobody photographs. The visible half of product design — the screens — is a small fraction of it. The rest is working out what should exist, arguing for it with people who hold other priorities, cutting the version you liked, and explaining the same decision a third time to someone who was not in the room.
The market has also moved the entry bar. Producing a competent screen is no longer scarce, so it is no longer a career on its own. What is scarce is judgement: knowing which of fifteen fixable things actually matters, being able to say why, and carrying the consequences once it ships. A generated option arrives knowing nothing about who it is for or what happens when the person using it is tired and in a hurry. Somebody still has to look at four plausible directions and rule three of them out.
So the answer is conditional rather than encouraging. Worth it if you are curious about people and can tolerate having your work taken apart in public on a regular basis. Not worth it if the appeal is that it looks like the comfortable way into tech, because that door has been closing for a while.
What I would tell someone deciding
Test the interest before you pay for it. Watch somebody use something — a form, an app, a ticket machine — and notice what you want to do about it. If your first instinct is to find out why they got stuck, the raw material is there. If it is to redraw the buttons, that is a different job, and a perfectly good one.
Then measure your progress in problems rather than in tools. Tool fluency has a short shelf life and it is the easiest thing on the list to acquire. The habit of finding the real problem and defending a choice is what carries a career across the next three shifts in the industry.
And be patient about the timeline in a way the advertising is not. People do get hired inside a year. The ones who last are the ones who spent that year building things that got criticised, not the ones who spent it finishing lessons.