What is a product designer in 2026? The title is shifting. The role is expanding. And for Mirko Pacitti, who was drawing before he could properly hold a pen, the answer has always been more about instinct than job description. In this interview, he talks about growing up with design, surviving the AI storm, and why the designers who thrive will be the ones willing to become something new. The interview is presented in his own words.
"You can't achieve performance without emotion, and vice versa."
What first sparked your interest in design, and what continues to drive your creativity today?
Actually, I was born into it. My dad was a graphic designer before Apple even existed. He trained me to have a keen eye for everything – paintings, books, objects, cars, and more. Since I was old enough to hold a pen, I never stopped drawing, designing, or coloring. Becoming a designer was a natural choice for me.
What drives me today is the same thing that has driven me from the start: no matter the medium, it’s about achieving something unique, sparking reactions, and evoking emotions.
In your view, what makes a design successful?
In our industry, we design for functionality and conversion – there is a long list of goals and rules to follow. It requires perfect timing for all profiles and skills to align in order to meet those objectives. You can’t achieve performance without emotion, and vice versa.
A good digital product guides the user through a series of behaviors, feelings, and actions. If even one of these fails, the product is at risk. Ultimately, a successful design is one that is aligned with its time and its stakeholders.
What do you find most difficult in your design workflow?
Today, the most difficult part is keeping up with the AI storm. To stay current with methodologies, quality standards, and delivery expectations, you have to adapt to new technologies and tools on a daily basis. There’s no longer any room for a comfort zone. We live in an era where every week brings a revolutionary new feature. It’s a never-ending learning process – it’s fascinating, but also exhausting.
The second challenge is actually a positive one: there are so many excellent designers out there. By sharing their work, they push the community forward, making it a constant – but rewarding – challenge to maintain such a high level of quality.
When designing for attention, which element do you prioritise most?
Designing for attention is a bit unfair, to be honest. You have five to ten seconds to convert using the wow effect while also building enough confidence to keep the user focused on their journey. You have to find the right balance between specifications, performance, budget, and deadlines.
A good technique is to break uniformity by creating screens and components with varying contrast – it helps to tell a story and keeps the user engaged.
Can you share an example of something that didn’t work as planned?
In my experience, what most often doesn’t go as planned isn’t the handoff to dev, but the handoff to the client. The importance of clients taking full ownership of their designed and developed products is frequently underestimated.Â
This is why documentation, client-first design, and user testing are so crucial. What feels natural to those of us in the industry can be totally unintuitive for the audience. That’s a lesson that should never be forgotten.
If you could go back, what advice would you give yourself starting out?
I’d tell myself: stop fighting just to defend the aesthetics – think about the product instead, and embrace new technologies. Also, don’t be afraid to fail – try new things even if they lead to a dead end. And most of all… chill out.
About the designer
Mirko Pacitti grew up surrounded by design – his father was a graphic designer before the personal computer existed, and that early exposure shaped everything. Today he works as a product designer with a perspective that runs deeper than most: design is never just about how something looks, but about how it performs, how it feels, and whether it earns the trust of the person using it.
He believes the designers who will matter most in the next few years won’t just be designers – they’ll be product engineers, fluent in both creativity and technical execution.
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