Leading with Craft
Articulating your value as an individual contributor — Abby Covert
Interview with Abby Covert about her career path as an individual contributor in a large org.
Leading with Craft is a limited series of articles where we shed a light on stories of designers with successful careers as individual contributors.
Curating and publishing hundreds of articles every month at the UX Collective, we have noticed an abundance of resources for designers switching careers to management, but a gap for those who want to continue to focus on their craft.
This series highlights professionals that never let their seniority move them away from their practice and their passion for what made them great in the first place, such as Abby Covert.
Abby Covert is a Senior Staff Information Architect and an active organizer, speaker, and mentor within the design community, engaging about Information Architecture and, really, how to make sense of any mess — the title of her book published in 2014.
We interviewed Abby in March of 2020 to learn more about her career path to becoming the first Information Architect at Etsy, where she leads collaborative IA projects with her craft.
Becoming an independent professional
UX Collective: At what point did you realize you wanted to start your independent practice and not follow a managerial path?
Abby: I went independent because I was running a UX team in a large agency and it felt like if I really wanted to just focus on Information Architecture (IA) then I would have to make a place where that could happen.
After a year of consulting through a firm, I found that the projects I wanted to focus on were more well-suited to a single practitioner.
I was running a UX team in a large agency and it felt like if I really wanted to JUST focus on IA then I would have to make a place where that could happen.
During my five years as an independent consultant, I wrote a book, spoke at a ton of events all over the world, taught in three different programs in NYC, managed volunteers on a few conferences, and served as the president of the IA Institute. I would never have been able to swing all that if I was committing 40+ hours to a salaried role.
Why move from independent consultancy to join a company, Etsy?
Etsy was my last client as an independent. After delivering my recommendations to them on a few IA-driven projects, I was approached about a full-time commitment. It was the first company that I really felt like I could spend the rest of my career architecting information for. I dug the mission, the culture, the people, and most importantly their willingness to bring me into a brand new role, as a remote full-time employee.
As I was considering this option I was also in a season of life where I knew I wanted to finally start a family. My husband and I had relocated closer to his family to have more support and we were looking at my independent work life and wondering how the heck we would ever be able to fit in pregnancy. Etsy has a generous parental leave program, as well as covering 100% of the cost of health insurance for employees and their families.
I also about that time had started really focusing on thinking, writing, and speaking about collaborative information architecture — but I worried that I would not be able to speak to it much more deeply without the added experience of embedding within an organization and collaborating my way through messes with a team.
I would not be able to speak to collaborative IA much more deeply without the added experience of embedding within an organization and collaborating my way through messes with a team.
Experimenting with management
Have you considered becoming a manager?
I actually did pursue the management track for a few years (2007–2010) and I learned a few critical things in doing so:
- Management is an entirely different skill-set. Really good managers don’t have to be good at the thing they are managing others doing, they need to know how to support, fight for and unblock people. So while I am quite good at IA, I struggled to set aside that skillset to instead focus solely on managing others. This showed in my management style, as I am sure that my former direct reports could attest: I was such a micromanager because I always knew how I would take on the problems my team faced and I had a hard time not being that way.
- Great managers are passionate about management! While I am glad that people are passionate about this, I don’t share this passion. My passion is information architecture and so I would rather put my time and energy into that skillset, not learning another one from the ground up.
My passion is information architecture and so I would rather put my time and energy into that skillset, not learning another one from the ground up.
The career path ahead
How do you see your career path evolving in the next few years?
To be honest, in terms of my career path: I truly don’t know. I am confident that there will always be messes to make sense of but I am unsure about what’s next for me. And for once in my career, I am ok with not knowing. I am deeply focused on a project and other than delivering on that I am not really planning too far out at this point. I am guessing many people are feeling like planning much right now isn't time well spent with the state of the world.
What are some of the challenges you see in our design industry, or more specifically to information architecture?
I think the biggest challenge that the IA field faces is educating the next generation. I see a lot of shabby resources and programs out there that are capitalizing on UX’s success and promising a quality of education that is then often not provided.
I see IA as a critical skill set in UX yet it is often eliminated as a topic in educational programs, or only spoken to in passing. In the very best of cases, I see it reduced to a set of deliverables like sitemaps and flow diagrams which leaves new UXers under the false impression that you can set IA once at the start and then forget it (which is a sure-fire way to have a weak IA approach).
Advice for designers to lead with their craft
What advice you would give for those who want to continue to grow but not take a management position?
My best advice is to make sure that you are clearly articulating the value that you bring as an independent contributor to the team. And that everyone understands that management is a whole other skill set and one that you have way less experience with. Too often I see teams set on the idea that once you are really good at something, the next step is to manage others doing that thing. This is a flawed logic that lands many of us in the hands of poor managers.
Make sure that you are clearly articulating the value that you bring as an independent contributor
Also when you are speaking with your manager about your job, make sure to ask what the growth of an IC looks like on their team. It’s best to find out if there is a ceiling at your particular company. If there is, question that ceiling and make the case to raise it if needed. Etsy has had to reassess their career ladder as a result of my joining the company, but that has opened up paths for folks that might not have had that choice before. Other companies need to be willing to do the same if they want to retain great talent.
Follow Abby on Twitter to know when her next talk is happening or when her next book is out.
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