The sails are new. The journey remains the same.

As of three weeks ago, I’ve taken on the role I previously disliked the most: a product manager. Which has me questioning what that means for who I am.

I keep thinking about this old problem: the Ship of Theseus. Over time, every plank gets replaced, every rope swapped out, every sail renewed. Eventually nothing original remains. The question: is it still the same ship? And am I still… me?

For most of my career, I’ve been a designer. Not just by role, but by identity. The person who spends their days imagining products, creating visuals, prototyping, learning about design foundations and animation and all the things that make designers designers. That was me. That was a big part of who I was.

But over time, things changed. The parts I enjoyed most shifted. The work that gave me energy looked different. And now I’m here, in a role I spent years holding at arm’s length, wondering if I’m still the same person I thought I was.

Change happens slowly, then all at once

There wasn’t a single moment where I realised I wanted this. No lightning bolt clarity. Just a gradual pattern.

I’d be on a customer call, hear about a problem, and get this rush of excitement about solving it. Not about designing the solution, but about the idea itself. I’d sketch out something rough, share it with the team, and the part that lit me up wasn’t the craft of making it beautiful. It was watching everyone get excited about what we could build. Seeing a customer’s reaction when we showed them we’d actually solved their problem.

The implementation? I still cared that it was really good, but I cared less about needing to be the one fine-tuning every detail.

I started spending more time thinking about what we should build next, what mattered most, how all the pieces fit together. I was zooming out. Looking at the product from 10,000 feet instead of 100 feet. And I liked it there.

What I realised was that I’d stopped seeking validation from having to be the one with the great idea. I just wanted to be part of a team that did something awesome.

That’s where I started noticing the planks on my ship were different than they used to be.

The thing about “product manager”

Here’s what made this complicated: I didn’t want to be a product manager.

I’d worked with PMs who took away my autonomy, who got in the way of what I thought I was good at. Later, I worked with great ones who enabled their teams and created clarity. But by then, I was already doing a lot of that work myself. As a designer with a broad remit, I was shaping direction, talking to customers, figuring out what we should prioritize. When a PM came in to do those things, it felt like overlap. Like someone was doing the parts of my job I cared most about.

So even as I started gravitating toward product work, I resisted the title. Because “designer” had been part of my identity for so long. And this wasn’t a promotion, some upward trajectory where you add “Senior” or “Staff” or “VP” to show progress.

This was lateral. A move where everything changes and nothing changes at the same time.

What’s actually different

I started this role three weeks ago. The shift is already clear.

I’m working through others instead of working through myself. Me doing good work now means enabling many others to do good work. That’s multiplicative impact instead of individual impact.

But it also means letting go. The tight collaboration on fine details. The satisfaction of pushing an interaction until it’s perfect. The direct line between the work I did and the thing that shipped is fuzzier now.

I don’t miss it as much as I thought I would. But I notice it’s gone.

Am I still me? If all the parts of the ship have been replaced, if what I do and how I spend my time has shifted, am I still the designer I was? Or am I someone new now? I think the answer is both. And neither. And maybe the question itself doesn’t matter as much as I thought it would.

Things change. What I enjoy changes. What I’m good at changes. The role I’m in changes alongside what the business needs from me. My idea of me is ever-changing.

The distinction between me as a designer and me as a product manager maybe isn’t that great. I just spend more time doing different things now and less time looking at other areas. And maybe I’m better at this because of everything that came before. All those years as a designer. Working with PMs who took my autonomy and ones who gave me clarity. Those parts didn’t disappear when the title changed, they’re why I can do this work the way I do it now.

The through-line is still there. I still love shaping the whole product. Working out what’s important. Speaking to customers and collaborating as a team to figure things out.

I still feel ownership over the work, even when it’s not my hands that made it. I still care deeply about seeing something great go into the world, regardless of who gets credit for it.

Those things haven’t changed. The planks are different, but the ship is still sailing.

So now what?

My title doesn’t define me as much as I thought it did. It defines the responsibilities I have officially in a company, but not who I am or what I’m capable of.

Since moving into a product role, I feel less need to seek permission. I just do the work that needs doing. The accountability is clearer, which makes the doing feel more natural.

And sometimes the thing I resist is exactly where I need to go. I resisted “product manager” because I was holding onto “designer” as identity, not just as a role. The resistance wasn’t about the work itself, I was already doing it. It was about letting go of a label that had defined me for years.

I’m still figuring this out. Still early in the voyage with these new parts. But the ship is moving. And it still feels like mine.