My career has been a series of fortunate mistakes, and I’m not sure it could have been any other way. I don’t know everything there is to know about building a design career but what I do know is that I love my job (even on the hard days). I’d love other designers to love their job to.
Careers, for the most part, can be accidental, but if I had my time again I’d consider the idea of designing my design career (in fact, I’m doing it for myself right now). And so, I offer this not as ‘advice’ that you can sue me over, but literally one perspective; stuff I know to be true from my own experience and what, with hindsight, I believe has led to where I am right now – a job I love with people I love working with.
Most career coaches will say, “Start with values”. To be honest, my 20-year old self, fresh out of uni, had no idea what values were, let alone self-aware enough to know what my values were. That may be different nowadays – the kids today are way more self-aware than I ever was. And yes, while values play an important role in shaping one’s choices, I believe firmly in experimentation first, values later. If you’ve never tried green tea ice-cream, how do you know you’ll like it?
It’s about direction over destination
At the moment, there are two things that very experienced designers end up doing:
- Building great products/services
- Building great teams that build great products/services
In parallel to this, very experienced designers can also be thought leaders – people who reflect on and share their deep experience with building great teams or products with the aim of helping the industry, as a whole, get better.
The pathways to get to these goals aren’t mutually exclusive, especially early on in your career. And, in my experience, the way to get to number 2 is to do number 1 first. Either way it helps to have a direction.
The pathway to learning how to build great products
One of the difficult things about Design is the lack of clarity on what skills designers even need. Stanford D School has a pretty good attempt, but it focuses very much on the abstract qualities of designers. Because they are abstract they feel pretty encompassing, but don’t really help early-stage designers whose focus is on building their Design toolkit so they can, in essence, do the work.
Right now, when I coach designers, I talk about 3 elements of the end-to-end product design process:
- Research – Experience in defining the problem
- Interaction Design – Experience in inventing solutions to the problem without the complication of graphic design
- Visual Design – Experience in translating the solution into colour, layout, typography etc.
These 3 are very bare bones. Other designers will say it’s missing stuff, it’s not broad enough, etc. But, for simplicity, these are the broad categories of the work that I think are important when you’re in the early stage of your career.
Finding a way into design
Most designers are drawn to Product Design from either end of the design spectrum.
There are the ones who begin their career as visual designers. They are typically strong in graphic design and often (but not always) land in creative agency environments that value the emotional value that’s often so key in marketing and advertising websites and digital products.
The other person who ends up being drawn to design are the science-oriented folks – they find their way via discovery and research. They are often analytical and deductive thinkers. Some are also naturally lateral in their thinking.
Both starting points are valid, neither is ‘better’ than the other. They’re just starting points and they often emerge from the natural strengths of the designer. The first question to ask of any early-stage designer is “which end of the spectrum are you starting at?”
Which end are you starting at?
Once you know that (for me, it was visual design), you know what you can contribute to any job right out the gate. You also know what you’re not naturally good at, or, in other words, what you need to learn (i.e. where you may be able to grow). The most important thing is that, once you admit your strength, it’s now a much easier pitch to any future employer.
I have a great eye, attention to detail, and a natural strength in using graphic design to create beautiful and useful interfaces. My strength is visual design. Here, take a look at my visual folio to prove it. What I’d like to understand more about is Research and Interaction Design. Will I get to do that in the role you’re offering?
I’m curious and great with people. I love doing the work to understand people’s problems and presenting what I find to others so that we can solve it together. I’d like to know more about the process of taking those insights and turning them into solutions. Will I get to do that in the role you’re offering?
It’s pretty simple: Here’s what I can contribute. Here’s what I want to learn.
The next bit can’t be coached because it’s all dependent on the job you’re applying for but there are often two ways that teams operate, and it normally depends on how big the team is.
- Small teams. They offer an opportunity for generalisation (or breadth). Designers in small teams tend to work across the whole design spectrum, end-to-end, because they have to.
- Large teams. They offer an opportunity for specialisation (or depth). Designers in large teams tend to break down the 3 broad areas into specialised areas. There’ll be a Research Dept, and UI/UX department that sometimes, but not always, includes UI design as a separate function.
Specialise or Generalise?
Because of the principle of direction over destination, there’s no right answer to whether an early-stage designer should generalise or specialise. Both are useful.
By specialising, the designer will get much deeper expertise in the nuances of whichever end of the spectrum they’re starting in. That depth will always be useful in a career. By generalising, the designer gets a ‘flavour’ of the 3 broad areas of design and so this may help them discover which parts of the end-to-end process they like or dislike. That’s also OK.
Sometimes, and depending on the person, we decide whether we want to be a generalist or specialist really early on. That’s also OK. And, at the time of writing, the world needs both and the world values both roughly the same. There is no right or wrong, but it’s about checking in with oneself every little while, often with someone a bit external to the day to day (like a coach, mentor or someone who has more experience than you), to get a sense of which one is feeling right at any given time.
Sometimes, we think we want to specialise, and try really hard to do so, and build up a whole career and identity around being that specialist, only to start to become curious about generalising. This is also OK. We change, sometimes often, sometimes never. The important thing is that we’re being mindful of it if it happens, embracing it, and then setting ourselves up to follow this new curiosity, no matter how late in life it comes.
The time horizons are 10 years, not next job
First and second jobs are really just a starting point, although they don’t feel like that at the time. As difficult as it is, I try to coach designers to think on a 10-year horizon – by the time I’m 30, what sort of design role do I have. And then, we work, job by job, carving a path to get there, learning and iterating along the way, just like any good product designer does on their own product. That vision may shift based on what someone learns in job one, or job two etc, and that’s OK. It’s about making a conscious choice, every step of the way.
Correcting a ‘wrong move’
No matter how much research or interviewing we do with a role, we never know the truth about the day-to-day of a job until we’re living it. We may have been told that this role we’ve just accepted will give us depth in research skills but we turn out working end-to-end as a generalist. We may get a shit manager or mentor, and more often than not, the role changes as we’re working in it.
But, the thing about wrong moves is that they’re very rarely ‘wrong’. Often what we think of as wrong is that they just didn’t meet our expectations or the goals we set out to achieve. (That happens in products all the time, by the way). When it comes to designing a design career, it helps to re-examine the day-to-day work occasionally to see what we *are* getting out of it, because, even the ‘worst’ jobs are good for something.
Levelling up to become a great Individual Contributor
Over time, usually 5-10 years, people have had enough experience to be really good at something – either a really good specialist or a really good generalist. At the time of writing, and with an average of people staying in a job for about 2-3 years, that normally equates to 3 or 4 jobs. Those jobs may be at the same workplace, or vastly different ones. Once again, the individual can choose, over time, to specialise or generalise in the domains they’re working in. I know some designers who are corporate enterprise specialists. I know designers who are expert designers for start-ups. Again, there’s no right or wrong.
As one gets more experienced, and the day-to-day ‘hard skills’ become more second nature, a space arrives in the brain to think about higher-order questions like what am I finding meaningful in my work. Sometimes single domains and industries ignite a spark and a motivation to focus, or, like me, some designers find that really boring and enjoy diving into completely new industries every few months.
It’s not until this point that we begin to talk about values (that thing that most coaches start with). With more experience, the cognitive load of learning the ‘hard skills’ has reduced, designers begin to think about why they’re doing what they’re doing and the impact they’re making in the broader world.
Some designers, at this stage, commit to being a very senior ‘individual contributor’ because they love being on the tools and making stuff, and work to position themselves in domains or industries that give them fulfilment because it aligns with their values. Other designers start to see value in mentoring and coaching other, more junior, designers and pick a track that most businesses call “Design management” which is really about designing teams that build products rather than designing the products themselves.
Building great teams that build great products
In the same way that some designers love ‘being on the tools’, others love what is essentially a different type of design challenge – designing teams.
As any designer will come to know: people are complex. They all have different needs and life experiences that mingle together to form a set of behaviours. Those behaviours, given the right space, purpose, and context, can amplify things for the better. And, just like a great individual contributor wants to understand how their users will use their product and service, great design managers want to understand the designers in their care: what are their strengths and how might they be best directed in the context of a design team, and in a cross-functional one.
There are no ‘personas’, but there are roles
People who build design teams know what’s needed to make a great product: in a simplified sense, it’s depth and consideration across research, interaction design, and visual design.
And so, the design manager’s challenge is to grow an individual’s skills in the way that it aligns with their personal career trajectory, whilst, at the same time, thinking about how all those individuals can work together to amplify each other’s work and, ultimately, make better products and services.
Design teams have roles – Researcher, Interaction Designer, UI Designer etc that need filling. But designers all come with infinite complexity around strengths, motivations, behaviours, and they change, iteratively, as the designer themselves grows. The best design managers I know are constantly and iteratively checking on the individuals and the relationships between them and their colleagues, to provide perspective and guidance on how to ensure everyone remains happy & well.
Transititioning from Individual Contributor to Design Manager
Sometimes, these transitions happen naturally, other times require a distinct job or role change. But, the advice I give to anyone trying it out is that it’s roughly a 2-year experiment. In my experience, career growth and tweaking team relationships takes time. It’s not something a person can switch-on overnight (although, it’s possible to see ‘progress’ by then). And, without oversimplifying things too much (it’s much more fluid than this in practice), these feel like a good guide:
- 6 months – understand the people within your stewardships as a design manager, and the environment they’re operating within. Individual strengths, career goals, ways of working, interests and curiosities, as well as things that are of no interest at all are all important on an individual level. Also understanding the team and organisation dynamics (the designer’s day-to-day ennvironmental context) is required to give yourself the best shot at creating happy and engaged teams (and great products as a result).
- 12 months – with regular 1:1s, pinups, critiques, and opportunities for small feedback cycles, you begin to see how your attention on people shifts individual and team dynamics. 12 months also typically gives a design manager a round of ‘performance reviews’ – both for their people and for themselves – and provides a formal way of understanding growth and goals.
- 6 months – a chance to explore a bit more depth in the ‘craft’ of people leadership and team stewardship and see if the wins and challenges of designing people and teams gives you the same feeling as shipping a cracking product that users love.
On ‘letting go of the tools’ as a design manager
Because of the almost infinitely complex and ever-changing nature of people, teams, and organisations, there is essentially infinite depth and iteration available to designers who choose the ‘manager’ track as their ‘craft’.
There’s a misconception that individual contributors reach a ‘ceiling’ in their craft earlier than a manager but, just as people are infinitely complex, technology and the way humans use and interact with it is also infinitely changing. And so, that ‘ceiling’ that people talk about with Individual Contributors isn’t one of problem depth or complexity, it’s simply money. The ‘market’ tends to value the problems that great people management and leadership solves more highly than the problems that an individual contributor solves. Good managers are also more scarce than good individual contributors and greater scarcity equals greater perceived value.
In my experience, a really senior individual contributor will always get value from picking up and understanding some of the skills of good design management – even if it’s not a forever career path. It isn’t necessarily about ‘letting go of the tools’ forever, it’s simply about broadening one’s skillset from research, interaction, and UI skills, to those things that organisations like to call soft skills.
And finally, on soft skills
In learning the craft of design – research, interaction design, and visual design, there’s a parallel track of skills that designers begin to build up from day 1 that often go unnoticed. They are used and developed by ‘doing’ the work. E.g. Presenting research to team members or other stakeholders. Taking insights from research and turning them into a product or service. Iterating through various UI design options to get to one that’s the ‘right one’. This parallel track of skills is what organisations and people tend to refer to as soft skills. Soft, because they go unnoticed and happen, often, without particular focus or structure. However, it’s exactly because we don’t cultivate them with intention, focus, and structure, that they can be quite difficult to learn.
The best thing any early-career designer can do is simply be familiar with them – giving them a label can often be just-enough definition for us to help pay attention to them as we focus on the more concrete processes and frameworks that often define our craft.
Empathy, or the ability to understand and share the feelings of others is critical. Without this, we’re unable to understand how painful or joyful something is for someone else. Empathy allows us to design the most positive interaction with a product or a business.
Communication is a no-brainer and whilst not specific to a designer, it’s what a designer does every single day. They need to communicate with users while doing research, with the team in building software or anyone who has an interest in the product and who need ideas conveyed clearly and concisely.
Active listening is part and parcel of being a good communicator. Asking the right questions at the right time can only come from truly concentrating, understanding and responding to others. It’s much harder to do well than you might think.
Self-awareness. A designer needs to know their own strengths and weaknesses, biases and preferences. Only by knowing these well can they perform effective and truthful research and devise solutions that solve problems in the way users need them to be solved. Crucially, this is often different to the way the designer or others in the team would personally like them to be solved.
Problem-solving is an obvious skill for a designer to have but nonetheless, can be difficult to hone. Yes, there are tools and techniques to learn how to problem-solve more effectively and efficiently but the motivation to solve it well is something a little harder to find. On top of this, designers are pragmatic and they use exceptional critical thinking. Nothing is perfect, but it doesn’t mean we can’t aim to be.
Imagination is the engine we use for coming up with new and innovative solutions to problems. The ability to create something from scratch that never existed before is unique and, to be honest, a bit magical. Designers are innately curious folk. They’re always reading, learning, watching and asking why. It’s this natural inquisitiveness that I think gives designers their great imaginations.
Lateral thinking is tightly coupled with imagination. The ability to view a problem from multiple angles, sometimes unusual ones, lays the foundation for a great creative thinker. Often, it’s the ability to borrow from different contexts and one’s own life experiences that strengthen this in a person. Whether you have experience or not, involving other humans will always produce more ‘lateral’ results.
Story-telling is innately human. It goes to the core of what we are as a species — but to tell a good one requires practice. Designers can spin a good yarn and it’s important. Not everyone in the team will get the chance to talk to users and so it’s up to designers to convey what they hear and learn from users in a way that’s compelling. Designers need to help the entire team build the same level of empathy for their product’s users so that everyone knows the problems they’re trying to solve, and why it’s important to solve them.
Humility. Let’s face it, no one knows everything. Designers are intimately familiar with the design process and the methods and tools they use to do great work, but at the end of the day, they’re human too. They make mistakes, get tired, under sleep and over-eat too. They might misread a user’s expression, or over-emphasise things occasionally. But, they’re also lifelong learners. They use the power of the team to reduce the risk of getting things wrong. After all, great products aren’t built by just one person and a designer is always part of a team.
Nothing is forever: constellations not paths
In my experience, designers seem persistently concerned with ‘the path’ – If I make this decision then there’s no going back. i.e. Individual Contributor or Design Manager. Visual Design or Research. Product Design or Service Design. But, what I’ve found is that design careers aren’t a set of binary decisions.
As people change, so do their interests, curiosities, and abilities. People get bored, or they discover new things. Technology and teams change and new opportunities for exploration and discovery emerge. Designers are, in general, curious folk. And Design, in general, is almost infinitely broad in its scope. As a professor of Design once said to me, Design is Everything.
And so, when I think about ways to define or design a design career, my conceptual thinking brain lands at constellations, not paths. The idea that designers can hope from one knowledge star to another, following their interesting and curiosities as they go. And, as long we remain reflective on our experiences, self-aware enough to know what we enjoy and what we might like to do next, a design career seems to be one of lifelong pursuit.
The skills a designer accumulates in research, interaction design, visual design, people leadership, and soft skills, (at any specialisation) are applicable in almost any capacity across any human endeavour – whether that’s building physical or digital products, or addressing some of the world’s most difficult and complex systemic challenges.
But, if the ‘user’ in the story of designing our own career is ourselves, it makes perfect sense to have a peer or two to check-in with – someone to give an outsider’s perspective, challenge our own biases, and help us think through our own tangle of thoughts to work out what we truly want in every new step in a career, or in the next job. That the direction we set at the start of our careers is still what we want (or now don’t want).
After all, how we spend our time is how we spend our lives and so isn’t it worth approaching it all with self-reflection, curiosity and optimism as we do with any design problem we work on, at whatever scale? To trust in the process of ‘build, measure, learn’ to iterate toward a career we’re enjoying and happy with? It’s what I’ve done and it’s worked out for me. I’m hoping that amongst all the nuances and differences amongst us, there’s a common thread that connects us through our practice.
More importantly, in my most recent iteration, is that I’ve discovered that I really enjoy helping others work it out for themselves, too. And here I am. I don’t know what’s next, but hopefully, it centres around helping others work out their path, too. Chances are I’ll learn something from their stories along the way.
Free 1:1 advice available
If there are designers out there, of any level or experience, with whom this has resonated, and they are struggling to find decent leadership in whatever role they’re in at the moment, I am always happy to chat – for free – about their design career. I can offer frameworks and tools to help designers think about their design careers so that they feel comfortable and confident in honing their craft in whatever way suits them. Sometimes having someone listen is all that’s needed. Please contact me if you’d like some time to chat.