Leading with Craft
Being intentional about your career decisions — Rachel Inman
Interview with Rachel Inman about her career path thus far and how to lead by example.
Leading with Craft is a limited series of articles where we shed a light on stories of designers with successful careers as individual contributors. We have noticed an abundance of resources out there for designers switching careers to management, but a gap for those who want to continue to focus on their craft.
This series highlights professionals (such as Rachel Inman) who never let their seniority move them away from what made them great in the first place: their practice, their passion, and their craft.
Rachel Inman is a Staff UX Design Lead designing the future of Google Maps & Search. At Google, she has also led a multidisciplinary team developing Google Maps Live View, designed experiences for Google Earth, and Project Sunroof. Prior to joining Google, Rachel designed experiences for Nike and Samsung at the interactive agency, R/GA. For the past 5 years, she’s enjoyed teaching design classes in New York City, Mexico City, Moscow, Barcelona, and is currently an adjunct professor at Politecnico di Milano. Rachel earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial design with an emphasis on interaction and urban design from Carnegie Mellon University.
UX Collective: Was there a point in your career where you realized you wanted to stay more focused on being an individual contributor, and not necessarily become a manager? Why?
Rachel: A few years ago, soon after becoming a UX lead, I remember having conversations with some of my friends in the design field who were a couple of levels and titles above me about their decision to become managers. I wanted to pick their brain because, at that point in my career, I just assumed becoming a manager was a necessary step to advancing at any company.
In one of these career heart-to-hearts, my friend, who also works at a big tech company, posed the question, “What gives you the most motivation and joy at work?” I thought for a bit and answered back, “The subject matter and nature of the problem space I’m tackling. And if what I’m designing will truly help the people I’m designing for.”
He asked me to imagine what it might be like to give that up — to not be directly involved in solving these interesting meaty problems for people using the products I was designing. This shook me a bit. Digging into interesting problems and finding new solutions had always been what had motivated me as a designer. Imagining that going away made me feel sad and not like myself.
So I resolved to stay on the IC track for as long as I wasn’t curious about learning the new skill set of management. Just because you were good at and enjoyed being an IC designer doesn’t mean you’ll be good at and enjoy being a manager.
I haven’t dismissed the idea of being a manager. It’s just that, for the last roughly five years, I’ve made the intentional choice to be an IC design lead. I want my decision to become a manager to be equally as intentional.
Taking on reports is a serious responsibility. I’ll be responsible for the careers of other people! If and when I do become a manager, I want to do a kick-ass job at it. I want to be there for my reports and support them in every way I can.
Finding the time, finding the balance
As a really senior designer, how do you balance doing hands-on work, but also leading the project, the team, and facilitating conversations across disciplines?
I try to be conscious of what I should guide, nudge, influence, or consult on versus do myself. At this point, the decisions feel largely intuitive, but if I reflect on it, it’s kind of a calculus of what the people around me are better skilled to do, what areas they want to grow in, and what they are personally interested in. Also, I try not to get in the way of positive momentum and energy. If someone is clearly jazzed about a problem and totally has the skills to tackle it, the best thing I can do is get out of the way or play more of a supporting role.
More tactically how do I manage hands-on work versus leading and facilitating? I need large blocks of uninterrupted no-meeting time to dig into problems. I can’t effectively jump in and out of problems and contexts in 30-minute chunks. This year, in particular, I’ve been pretty good about blocking off mornings and Fridays for heads-down work. Jamming on something in the morning hours before everyone else is up feels awesome and that’s when I do my design work.
And how has that balance been working out for you?
It’s great now, but a few years ago I definitely went through a phase of being uncomfortable with the fact that I was spending way less time actually designing things in Sketch and more time designing conversations with cross-functional partners and creating problem-framing decks.
I felt like I was no longer “being a designer.” But after some time, I grew to realize (with the help of my amazing manager) that the problem framing, facilitation, and design sprints I was leading were just as important as the literal use of design software. I had to grapple with the fact that I’d grown to measure my own worth as a designer based on the output of very literal design artifacts. When my role shifted more towards leading a team, I had to become comfortable with the fact that I’d be doing a variety of activities at varying altitudes and just because I wasn’t exporting hundreds of artboards didn’t mean I wasn’t being effective.
Not trying to plan every little thing
How do you see your career path evolving in the next few years?
I try to center my career around feeding my curiosity. You know that little voice inside your head that says, “This is really interesting”? I try to pay close attention to that voice, so the throughline in my career has been me finding projects and people I’m excited to learn from. I’m not someone who is trying to achieve a certain title or degree of influence by a certain time. There’s no 5- or 10-year plan. Concretely, I tend to gravitate to teams or projects that help people:
- Learn about the world around them
- Develop a new or enhanced perspective
- Feel connected to their community
- Build their confidence
The people I work with are also super important to me. If I can work with smart, talented, enthusiastic, creative people and design for the four goals I listed, that’s even better.
And, as I mentioned earlier, I think I’ll try managing at some point. I just want to truly feel like I’m ready and curious to tackle that challenge and give it my all. Luckily, I feel supported by my manager and mentors to make this decision on my terms, when I feel ready.
Anything that keeps you up at night?
The world burning, unanswered emails, and the fact that I drank coffee too late in the day.
We can relate. Shifting the conversation a bit: designers love what they do, but at some point in their careers, they feel the pressure to become a manager. What are some of the challenges you see in our industry for those who want to continue to grow but not take a management position?
Designers need to stop being pressured into becoming managers. Managers who pressure their reports into management are not setting their reports up for success and are putting their report’s reports in a suboptimal position. No one wants to be managed by a reluctant manager. Companies also need to lay out clear paths and examples of how people can continue to rise as both individual contributors and managers. That means clearly articulating what IC work looks like and what its impact should be at every level.
It’s also helpful for senior ICs to carve out time to mentor more junior ICs who are looking for guidance. Junior ICs will naturally interface with their manager, but exposure to senior ICs gives them a clearer picture of what the two paths might be like and which is right for them.
Senior IC designers coming together to share their experiences has been a recent highlight for me at work. It feels like there are less of us than those who are people managers and we don’t always work directly with each other. It’s incredibly helpful and refreshing to come together and share what’s working and what we’re struggling with.
What does “growth” mean for you?
Growth for me means I’m learning. As soon as I feel like I’m no longer learning at a rapid rate, I start looking at how I might need to change my situation. Sometimes that means changing something big like my role or switching projects. It can also mean changing who I spend time learning from or even challenging myself to learn about an entirely new subject. Most recently, I’ve been taking storytelling and writing classes at NYU. That’s been incredibly hard and nerve-wracking, but that’s how I know I’m growing.
When thinking specifically about my design work, part of that constant learning means becoming comfortable with greater and greater complexity and ambiguity. Like when I first started designing augmented reality features for Google Maps, everything felt so open-ended and overwhelming.
I actually remember a particular meeting with my manager where I was venting about how it was such a hard problem to tackle. I think he said something to the effect of, “Well it’s up to you to figure it out.” Something simple like that. At that moment I realized no one was going to figure this out for me and no one around me had the answer either. So I dove into that problem, waded through the ambiguity, tested countless prototypes, dealt with the discomfort, and came out the other side having learned so much about designing in a complex and ambiguous space, in addition to how important collaboration across disciplines is.
You can learn more about Rachel’s work at rachelinman.design. Follow her on Twitter to know when her next talk or class is happening.
More about this series:
