Degreed Launches New ‘Product Experience Manager’ Signaling a Bold New Era for Work Redesign in Response to AI

Salt Lake City, UT, May 14th 2026 – Degreed, the leading enterprise learning system for workforce transformation, today announced a significant change in its Product organization, positioning the company at the forefront of rethinking and redesigning how work is done in the AI era. Degreed is now collapsing its separate Product Manager and Product Designer roles into a unified position: Product Experience Manager.

This strategic evolution is driven by the rapid maturing of AI and coding assistance tools, which now allow for the automated visualization and construction of product ideas. With new tools performing tasks that were once solely the domain of product designers – such as prototyping and leveraging Degreed’s established design UI system for consistency – the need for separate functions has diminished.

There are also meaningful positive gains to be had as a result of this change. The creation of the Product Experience Manager role is designed to unlock speed, agility, and consistency across the product development lifecycle, addressing the tremendous pressure facing the SaaS industry. By merging the responsibilities of design and product management, the company reduces the time lag inherent in traditional Product-to-Design-to-Engineering handoffs.

Crucially, this is a re-framing of role scope, not an elimination of talent. “It’s important to stress, we are not eliminating people; we are empowering them with updated skills and roles to become builders, ready for whatever the next era of digital transformation might bring,” said David Blake, CEO of Degreed. “The ability to rethink and reorient their functional roles will be an important skill for any career they have in the modern enterprise.” The company’s approximately 25 individuals currently in Product Manager and Product Designer roles are being retitled and upskilled to meet the demands of the new role. 

The Product Experience Manager is an evolved “builder” role, blending customer positioning and understanding the “job to be done” with practical interaction design. Professionals from design backgrounds will now learn more about customer positioning, while those from product management will gain skills in interaction design, making the entire organization more adept at blending functional areas of expertise and faster in using the available tools to accomplish this objective. This integrated model ensures that business priorities, user needs, and employee career development are balanced and coincide, focusing on effective outcomes rather than just “pushing pixels”.

“This is an inevitability for where things are going in the market, and we are choosing to ride the crest of this wave now,” said Blake. “The era of the ‘SaaS-pocalypse’ has eroded traditional business value, and every company must be willing to take bold steps. Our new Product Experience Manager is the future of work: a highly agile role that leverages AI to accelerate product delivery, ensuring we are not just building features, but building the best user experience with the greatest speed. And supporting our employees to evolve their career relevance at the same time.” 

For more information, visit degreed.com.

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