TLDR: Wireframes were never the job. They were the first thing everyone in the room looked at together. Now that anyone can generate a prototype, that shared picture is scarce — and owning it is what design leadership is for.
User Experience Designers create context. We have the unique skill set to read product requirements, talk to customers, understand what the business wants, and put it on paper. Napkin, sketchpad, or Figma, it doesn’t matter.
Bringing low-fidelity mockups and visuals to meetings with developers, project managers, and business owners was not about saving time. It was about asking: “This is the thing that you told me you wanted - is this what you meant? Does this match the requirements? Do you understand it? Is this what our customers want?” That’s the job. The goal is to create enough context for the people in the room to have a meaningful conversation.
Wireframes, journey maps, service blueprints, and site maps are often the first visual conception of an idea. It’s the first time a group of people with different priorities and perspectives look at the same thing. Whether it’s a wireframe or full visual design, a designer's value is bringing together a vision that represents both the customer and the business.
At Endava, I was building a set of wireframes for a login flow. A pretty standard experience that most developers and project managers don’t need annotations or diagrams for. This time I took an extra step and created a flow chart. Simple lines and text callouts that pointed to the three entry points and failure pathways. Once it was done, one of the developers thanked me for making the flow chart. That developer hadn't seen all the paths and said the map made it much clearer simple, additional task made the context much more clear.
Why consider this process at all today? AI has arguably eliminated the need for wireframes; we can get to full visuals at the speed of a prompt. Well, now everyone can get to those visuals at the same pace. In some ways, this democratizes the creation process: a developer who never had access to the skills or tools to design can use an AI tool to show their own vision. The same for a product owner or project manager. It’s incredibly valuable to have multiple perspectives on features from every side of the business, with each person bringing their own concept, perception, and preferences. The question then becomes: who owns the final design? Who is keeping track of the changes? When do the variations converge?
The downside to this new process is fragmentation. If no one sits in the same room and looks at the same thing, who owns the decisions? Do we skip user testing because the prototype already looks done? Who is asking, "Is this right for our customers?"
At Verizon, I worked within Experience Architecture. This team creates resources that developers, designers, and business units can use to make decisions. On my team, we documented and visualized global and local attributes across our products. This clarified which apps required “First Name,” “Display Name,” or “Greeting Name” and laid them out in an ontology graph people could navigate. This is no different than a wireframe; it’s about visually interacting with the information in front of us and providing context. I believe artifacts like this are the glue that will hold fragmented, AI-generated products together. They're convergence references that let everyone in the room look at the same thing and make cohesive decisions.
Tools and outputs will change. But someone has to own the brief before the prompts start, run the room when the prototypes come back, and write down why we chose what we chose. Good design processes own the decision record. Good design teams will align, converge, and create something whole that a customer will want to use.