Navigating A Design Career, Part II: Figuring Out What You Want
Previously, I shared some lessons from my career progression. In this post, I’ll propose a framework for designers to find out what design discipline fits them best. Whether you’re a junior designer or aspiring to enter the design field, I hope these insights and basic concepts help you navigate your career effectively.
Starting out as a junior designer is tough, especially nowadays. Skill requirements seem overwhelming, everyone expects you to have some work experience already, and — the worst part—the market is highly saturated but has fewer available opportunities.
To navigate these challenges, you can be strategic about your career choices. Knowing your skills, where they fit best, and how to further develop them can help you progress faster.
Here is my framework to think through those things.
1. Where do you want to go?
The career ladder can be very different from organization to organization. If we look at its usual representation, we can see that, at some point, the path starts to diverge.
You start as a junior to mid-level designer, where you focus on small-scale individual output and mastering hard skills. After you achieve a certain level of skill and autonomy, you are faced with a decision: Do you want to be a people manager or an individual contributor?
The People Manager path focuses on building effective teams and managing people. It is most commonly followed as a way to climb all the way to the top (assuming that design leadership roles exist within an organization). This path can be tricky nowadays since manager roles tend to flatten. Managers are asked to embrace the dual role of the “player-coach” — being hands-on while at the same time managing people.
The Individual Contributor (IC) path focuses on leading laterally, through cross-functional initiatives and mentoring people. This may less often get represented in companies, depending on their size and investment in design. It can also be unclear how IC roles can lead up to the VP or Chief levels since it misses the people management part.
This kind of design ladder usually represents possible paths from the perspective of a salaried employee. It’s not the only way to practice design craft, as you may want to try the freelance/consultant path. Being a consultant requires an additional set of skills such as getting and managing client relationships, or invoicing. You’d probably want to consider this option after you’ve mastered core design skills.
2. What kind of design suits you best?
Design roles tend to be broken into different areas spanning from research and information architecture, to interaction and UI design.
However, being a generalist is nowadays sought after more than being a deep expert in a narrow field. Keep this in mind when you think about how you want to specialize.
Key areas I want to emphasize here are product, growth, and branding design, as they may require different skills and ways of thinking.
- Product design focuses on experiences within a product or service, aligned to a business goal. It has a broader view than just UX design. Do this if you like to solve the sudoku of complex in-product experiences.
- Growth design focuses on experimentation to drive engagement, retention, and conversion for a product. Do this if you’re good with analyzing data, and like having a fast approach to shipping things.
- Marketing & branding design focuses on creating digital visual assets and interactions for branding, promotion, and sales (think landing pages). Do this if you’re into UI and motion design and want to be as creative as possible.
3. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
Understanding your strengths and weaknesses as a designer is a crucial step in planning your growth. Knowing your purpose, what you’re good at, and where you want to improve can help you focus on opportunities that will truly matter.
3.1 Know yourself: The Ikigai model
Ikigai translates to “reason for being” and represents the intersection of four fundamentals: passion, profession, mission, and vocation. This can be a powerful tool to find a fulfilling career for you. Think about what you want out of your career by looking at what you love, are good at, and then what the world (in this case, a company) needs and can pay you for.
Knowing the answers to these questions can guide you toward projects and roles that not only utilize your skills but also align with your passions and values. Are you more excited about research than UI design? Do you dread the world of AdTech? That’s what you want to take note of.
3.2 Know the team: Skill Mapping
Design practitioners can possess a wide variety of skills. Teams inside companies are usually built to cover this variety, but sometimes, there might be skill gaps. When a new job post is out, a hiring manager will likely look to fill some of the team gaps in terms of skill or seniority.
This is where skill mapping comes into play. You can take this structured approach to assess your design competencies based on key skill areas, proficiency, and gaps. Then, when you are applying for a company, you can increase your chances for success by understanding what they are looking for in terms of design skill set and cultural fit. Map those to your skills and preferences. Are you strongest in UI while they need more of a UX person? Is the job ad emphasizing strong facilitation, while you’re at a novice level with it?
4. Where should you work?
Companies come in all shapes and sizes, and it’s important to choose the right one to work for if you want to keep your sanity. Here is the breakdown of their three basic characteristics and how they might impact your work.
4.1. Company size
- Early-Stage Startups
Early-stage startups are exciting and fast-paced, often requiring people to wear multiple hats. However, they usually lack established teams and processes, which can be challenging for junior designers who need more guidance. - Small to Medium Businesses (SMBs)
SMBs offer a dynamic environment with more structure than startups. You’ll likely find dedicated design teams and opportunities to learn from experienced colleagues. This setting is ideal for learning from others about design craft, but also learning about collaboration and scaling design. - Enterprises
Large enterprises might seem slow and bureaucratic, but they can provide valuable experience with established processes and extensive resources. For junior designers, enterprises could offer great opportunities to be part of an established design team, learn from seasoned professionals, and work on large-scale projects.
4.2. Business Type
Businesses target different types of users, so their complexity may depend on the business model. Usually, we distinguish businesses based on who is buying their services: ordinary users like yourself, other businesses, or a combination of both. Below is a breakdown of how this might impact design work.
Business-to-Consumer (B2C)
Examples include HelloFresh or Trade Republic apps.
B2C companies aim to delight their users and simplify experiences as much as possible, to ensure the conversion of a large number of individual users. Designing for these experiences may involve fast iterations and experiments, but also work on establishing a strong brand identity. Very often these products are in a mobile space, so understanding mobile design patterns and how to design for multi-device experiences will be important.
Business-to-Business (B2B)
That’s apps like Contentful or anything from SAP.
In B2B companies, design work will focus on crafting experiences for other business professionals. This usually involves working on, or even connecting different complex systems, so be prepared to outline user flows, process diagrams, or even dive into service or systems design. Often, the B2B design work focuses on the web app experience, with elaborate dashboards or forms. Aesthetics might be secondary to functionality and take a long time to propagate across all systems, so prepare to advocate for design every step you take.
A more in-depth comparison between B2B and B2C SaaS design is available here.
B2B2C
Examples are Zalando, Airbnb, and Etsy.
When a company supports the B2B2C model, it means that it supports an ecosystem of interactions between other businesses and individuals. As a designer in such a company, you’d probably focus on one of the target users, while keeping an overall understanding of both audiences. Balancing these dual needs, and untangling complex workflows and interactions between the two might be the biggest challenge.
Agencies
That’s EdenSpiekermann or Slice Digital.
Working in an agency tends to be dynamic and versatile. Agencies take on client work where projects have a start and end date, so working against a deadline and adapting to client feedback fast is of utmost importance. Usually, agencies have some templates or checklists to deliver a project in a structured way, which helps with getting started and frees up time to be truly creative and innovative. The downside is that there may be a lack of deeper learning and iterations over a product — you deliver the project to in-house teams and move on.
4.3. Industry
Businesses operate in different industries, so they may face different problems and serve a different user base:
- They may operate in a very regulated space, like healthcare, fintech, or food industry
- They may enter an already established industry where competition is fierce or try to pioneer a new one (remember the blockchain craze, or AI nowadays?)
- They may create solutions for a very narrow set of skilled users where understanding the domain is important, like DevOps
Knowing the industry you’re in will make you a better designer. Caring about what industry you’re in will make you an even better one. When choosing a job, think about what excites you, or where you might have some good transferable skills. It will help to better empathize with users and therefore build better products.
5. Who you should collaborate with?
The collaboration between PM, Engineer, and Designer is what Teresa Torres calls a product trio. It should be the cross-functional base for making product decisions — your core. However, when working on problems, you’ll want to go beyond that and ensure you have data points from different areas across the organization. You need to ensure you can connect the dots from different areas and have a diverse set of opinions when framing the problem.
For example, you may want to seek out the expertise of a data analyst or a support representative when collecting quantitative data to inform your design decisions. You may want to work with a content writer or product marketing manager to get the wording of your UI right, or you may even want to check some stuff with the legal department, especially if you work in a highly regulated space.
Show your designs to different people early and often. Don’t ask for feedback only from designers, solicit feedback from a cross-functional group: Sales & Support people, Product & Engineering. And of course, your end-users.
Conclusion
Designers are storytellers. When we present ourselves to the world, we need to be confident and comfortable in the story we are telling. Use the tips above to craft your story and navigate your career in an impactful way. Experiment with mixing career approaches until you find a combination that fits you best in terms of skill set, passion, and value.
Your career path is uniquely yours — embrace continuous learning, seek mentorship, and stay curious.
