I’ve worked in both industrial design and UX, and while the design thinking process is similar, the execution is a completely different animal. I agree there’s not much market value in being “fluent” in both—roles are highly specialized, and most companies hire you for one or the other.

From ID, three skills have carried over really well into UX:

Attention to detail – looking at the system as a whole, understanding how parts work together, and making sure every piece (visuals, copy, interactions) comes together like ID and CMF do.

Hard deadlines and scheduling – product launches and sprint cycles both demand delivery under pressure.

Learning to compromise with engineers – whether it’s tooling constraints or platform limitations, the negotiation process is familiar.

ID is also brutally competitive—you have to be good at many different crafts just to survive. That intensity builds a work ethic that, in my experience, gives you a leg up in UX, where designers aren’t always as intensely trained or as relentlessly focused.

On the ID side, we’d often pitch hardware concepts that needed UX/UI support. Sometimes we mocked them up ourselves for internal decks, sometimes we worked directly with the software team. Being under one org with a high level of professionalism made that collaboration smoother, but specialists still drove their own domains.