Manifesto
Orchestrating Experience
An open letter to the people who design products
I have been designing digital products for years. This year I watched many colleagues question their place in the profession, and I think I know why. This letter is what I learned while building Bitácora. It is also an invitation.
A craft that keeps changing its name
First they called us interface designers. Then UX designers. Later, product designers. Each name arrived when the work had already changed and the old one no longer fit.
It is happening again. What we do no longer fits inside “designing screens.” We take an idea from a team’s mind to a product that behaves exactly as it was imagined, with the client, the user and engineering inside the same process.
That has a name. We are experience orchestrators. After UX comes OX.
What we saw this year
In 2026 the ground shifted under our profession. Designers and developers with years of craft began to ask whether they still had a place. Some feel they no longer fit. Others changed course and now do something completely different.
The question that keeps coming up is not whether we will be replaced. It is quieter than that: whether what we know how to do still matters.
It still matters. What fell behind are the tools we did it with.
The problem did not start now
The tools we design products with were born for something else. They inherited the methods of photo retouching, vector illustration and graphic design: layers, paths, artboards. They are good at composing an image.
But an experience is not an image. It is something people use, something that responds, changes state and lives in the hands of someone in a hurry.
For decades we were made to play every instrument at once. Hours spent aligning, naming layers, redrawing the same button in every state, writing specs that engineering had to translate all over again. We delivered a drawing of the product, not the product. And in the gap between that drawing and what got built, we lost exactly what we cared about most.
Adding is not changing
When the way software is built changed, the design industry reacted the way large companies do: by adding. A new button, a new panel, a new promise in the earnings presentation.
Many of those additions answer to what investors and boards expect more than to what a designer needs on a Tuesday afternoon with a deadline on top of them.
Adding a new feature to an old method does not change the method. And a method made for drawing cannot be used to orchestrate.
What it means to orchestrate
In music, the orchestrator does not play every instrument. They decide every note. They know what sounds, when, how loud and why, and they write it so that each part of the orchestra can make it real.
Orchestrating an experience is the same. It means understanding, all at once, the technology it is built with, the craft of design, the emotions of the person who will use the product, and what the business needs to achieve. It means bringing the team, the client, the user and engineering into the same score. And it means controlling every detail without having to execute each one by hand.
The interface designer drew the experience. The experience orchestrator leads it until it exists.
Bitácora, the heart of this transition
I built Bitácora from scratch so that the people who design products can take this step. It is not a drawing tool with something added on. It is where experience gets orchestrated, from idea to handoff.
From idea to canvas, almost instantly. What the team imagines is narrated and sketched, and it appears as real screens. The idea does not wait for someone to finish moving rectangles.
Iterate to an unmatched level of detail. Every adjustment is dictated on the screen and you see it applied. You iterate as many times as it takes, until every element is exactly where it belongs.
Control over every detail. You can draw every element and decide every state and every motion. The pixel still matters. What changes is that you no longer have to push it.
Products that behave the way you imagined them. What you see on the canvas is what gets built. No intermediate drawing, no translation.
The client inside the orchestra. They comment on the screen itself, compare versions and watch the project move forward. Feedback arrives where the work happens.
The user at the center. You put the product in the hands of the people who will use it and understand what they feel, where they hesitate and what they need, before it is built.
On your own or with a team, from any device. On a computer, a tablet or a phone. With your team working on the same project at the same time, or by yourself.
A handoff that is read, not interpreted. Bitácora fits the way software is built today: engineering receives the design exactly as it is, with its measurements, its styles and its intent.
Bitácora is the operating system of the experience orchestrator.
What an experience orchestrator believes
- Leading the experience over executing every piece.
- Deciding every detail over pushing every pixel.
- Screens that behave over drawings that describe.
- The client inside the process over rounds of approval.
- Understanding the people who use the product over assuming.
- A handoff that is read over a handoff that is interpreted.
- Your own judgment over any shortcut.
The items on the right brought us here. The items on the left are the craft to come.
To anyone who feels they no longer fit
The problem was never you. It was your tools.
The craft is not over. It is growing. It is shedding everything that was never craft, the hours of aligning, exporting, explaining what was already drawn, and keeping what always mattered: understanding people and designing for them, from beginning to end.
You do not have to play every instrument. You have to decide every note.
Welcome to the craft of orchestrating experiences.
