Navigating A Design Career, Part I: Lessons From My Ups and Downs
Recently, I had a talk where I shared my career path and learnings with aspiring designers. I thought to turn those into a blog post hoping that these insights help more people navigate their design careers through these “continuously uncertain times”.
Last year, I completed the ‘Product Management Foundations’ course on Reforge. The course provided tips and tricks for advancing a Product Manager (PM) career. It aimed to ingrain the concepts of stakeholder management, collaboration, and the difference between optimization and innovation into future PMs. Throughout the course, I pondered: “Why aren’t designers similarly taught these concepts?”
As designers, we don’t usually get such strategic guidance, even though it is essential for success on the job. We’re taught how to be creative and how to build a portfolio based on the good old empathize-to-implement loop (which no one cares to read, btw). Design education is still closely tied to arts, and it may miss teaching the designers the basic concepts of running a business, or how to collaborate effectively. Mike Monteiro sums it up best in his book “Ruined By Design”:
Anyone who wants a career as a designer is going to need to speak about someone else’s business and organizational goals. They’re going to have to learn how to analyze data, and how to measure effectiveness. They’re going to have to learn how to build and extend brands and to do goal-driven work. Most of all, they need to learn how to measure the effectiveness of their own work. Not only for the company, but more importantly for society at large. Design is not about expressing yourself.
I wish I had known some of these when I started twelve years ago.
My Background
I started my design career after a short internship at a nice Croatian company and, my goodness, I couldn’t be happier! I knew how to code, I did some basic web design projects at uni, and I had a previous education in graphic design. I reveled in the idea of going to work every day and getting paid to tinker with things in Photoshop/Fireworks.
That was wrong, of course.
I had no clear idea what it meant to be a designer back then, and what was worse — nor did the company that hired me. I used to spend too much time in the solution stage, focusing on technicalities.
A bit later in my career, I joined early-stage startups where I noticed that I don’t know much about product discovery. I was failing to connect business problems with my design solutions.
I realized that if I wanted to be a good designer, I needed to focus where it matters. So, I left behind the branding and coding work and made space for user research, facilitation, and uncovering how business and user needs meet to build something valuable. This is what got me to the Senior title and beyond.
As a Principal designer, I now spend far more time wearing a Product or Project manager hat than designing UIs. My job is to connect people from different business areas so that we come up with solutions to complex, system-wide problems.
Where could I go from here? Who knows.
What I Would do Differently
As you saw from my career path, there was a dip in my progress, and getting to the senior title seemed to take a while. This is because of a couple of factors:
- Too early in my career, I was working as a solo designer. I joined early-stage startups on multiple occasions, where I was the only designer. I had to learn from my own mistakes and have thus progressed or adjusted my approach slower than expected.
- I was not intentional about finding a mentor. I consumed a lot (and I mean A LOT) of content online on best practices, new approaches, and case studies, but it is not the same as having someone with more experience working through a specific problem. Finding mentors along the way happened naturally because people saw that I could use some help (thanks IGL, you’re forever in my heart!).
- I was trying to do too much at the same time. My skill set was too broad and at the same time too shallow to do exceptional things. While wearing many hats is certainly the mindset that early-stage startups look for, I often found myself battling time management by taking on work ranging from branding to front-end.
If you don’t want to be as random as I was, I would recommend the following principles to help with your design career progression.
As a Junior
At this point, you probably have some bootcamp projects or some stuff you did on your own. You should aim to get more real-life projects where you can collaborate with a cross-functional group of people.
- Learn the basics. Take the time to learn how to use the basic concepts or tools of the trade. You should understand how to apply the basic concepts of color theory, typography, or Gestalt principles to projects. You should be comfortable with wireframing, both through digital tools or by hand, so learn about UX sketching. You should also know how to use the tools for design production, such as Figma (or whatever is the rage nowadays — trust me, you stop caring about tools at some point).
- Get into a larger design team or find a good mentor. If at all possible, aim to make your first steps as a designer alongside other designers, to ensure getting feedback and guidance early and often. Preferably, it would be someone from your company, but if not, there are other resources like ADPList where you can find great designers to talk to.
- Learn what fits you best. Experiment with different types of projects, companies, frameworks, or even tooling to understand what works well for you, and where your interests and strengths are.
As a Mid-level designer
By this point, you should have a couple of projects under your belt, and hopefully some self-awareness around your strengths and weaknesses. You can now deepen your expertise.
- Deepen key hard skills more. It might be time to build yourself into a T-shaped expert, to deepen your focus in one specific design area (like research or UI), while keeping broader skills in other areas up-to-date.
- Learn how to facilitate and present ideas. You should learn how to facilitate design workshops, brainstorming sessions, and design critiques. Additionally, you should practice presenting your ideas clearly and persuasively to stakeholders or team members. The majority of the time, design work is just talking to people.
- Learn how to talk business. Let’s be real — we’re not hired to be creative unicorns, we’re hired because the company wants to sell something. You should, therefore, understand the company’s goals, revenue models, and market positioning. You should then be able to articulate how your design decisions align with business objectives.
As a Senior
At this point, you can autonomously dive deeper into providing value to business through design. You may find that you feel constrained by working only on some specific feature area, so you can start thinking beyond this and consider the overall product strategy.
- Own outcomes and metrics. You should be comfortable showing the impact that your designs have on key metrics. Articulate what is the success criteria for the problem you are solving, and you define how this will be measured. You should then be able to iterate on your designs to see how they will impact your success criteria.
- Drive strategy and holistic experiences. As a designer, you are the glue that holds the key customer experiences together, from creating an account to subscription cancellation. Your cross-functional peers may rarely think of the product that way. You will need to show them how the solutions that you are building as a group fit (or don’t fit!) into that seamless customer journey.
- Influence people across functions. Oftentimes in your work, you will uncover problems or possible optimizations that go beyond your immediate focus area. You should be comfortable advocating for those in your cross-functional group and beyond. Build networks across an organization so that you can advocate for user-centered approaches and best practices at all times. Support and Sales teams are your friends.
Conclusion
There’s no single path to success in design and what worked for me may not be the best for you. However, with a healthy dose of continuous learning, feedback, and self-exploration you can for sure craft your unique way.
In the second post of this series, I’m laying out a basic framework to help you decide where to take your design career. Check it out!
Thanks for reading!
