Designer vs Corporation

7 tips to thrive as a creative in a corporate environment

After 5 years working at TomTom I’m now about to embark on a whole new adventure, on the other side of the Atlantic. This decision has made me reflect a lot about myself, my career so far, my initial expectations and ambitions, and how these have changed as time progressed. With all that in my head I started to think: “hummm, I can probably make an article out of this…”. So I did.

Why have I stuck around the “corporate” world?

I’ve been working as a designer for almost 13 years (*suddenly realised I’m getting old*) started working in small local design/advertising agencies while I was still studying, after that I tried my luck at freelancing (#fail) and soon after that I started working in-house for a non-design company.
Long story short, for 8 out of 13 years I have been working in-house for a couple “corporations”.

The reason why I stuck around, at first, was because of the stability & better pay, especially at the time, when I was living in a small town north of Porto (Portugal). I was struggling, working for this small agency who would “forget” to pay me every other month, and going freelance didn’t make it any better, thus working for a “proper company” sounded like a safer bet.

Once I got into it, it started to become more about real world impact, especially when I moved to London (UK) to work for TomTom. Working in-house for a company that builds their products allowed me to really understand and have influence in things that would reach loads of users, and that made me feel like I could finally have a real impact through my work in other people’s lives.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though, bear in mind, because you have a focus, there’s definitely less diversity on the work that you do, and the pace can be slow-ish at times. On the other hand, you’re designing something that will go beyond a dribbble shot, or a case study. You can work directly with engineers and together shape ideas into something tangible and doable.

When I started working as a designer, my dream was just to make cool things and get paid for it, and I thought the best place for that was in a design agency, because you’re surrounded by like-minded people who value Design and have the same purpose.
However, despite the understanding of the value of Design, that doesn’t always translate to your pay-check. I feel like they know designers really love what they do, and in an agency, you already get to be creative doing lots of cool things — so you can’t really expect to have so much fun and be super well paid, am I right?

Next to that, after being in-house and have seen the work delivered by a couple external agencies, I can see some limitation they face, such as not fully understanding the business they’re designing for, agreeing to unrealistic deadline or simply not always being able to follow the building of their ideas, which means that some things might not come out as they expected, or at all, because no one was there to push the development teams to do it.
Working in-house I see the importance of being able to be part of the whole process, as well as having direct contact with Engineers, PMs, Data Scientists, Testers, Researchers, Marketing and many other people that are integral part of building a product.
Based on my experience so far, I much rather be part of the team that is building the product and sees it through, than being an external service provider which flies off to the next project before their baby is even born.

It’s not all smooth sailing, though. Due to the diversity of product development teams, you will need to learn how to navigate around some difficulties, and if you want to have a big impact you have to become a master navigator, to make sure you take as much ideas as possible to solid ground.
To help with that, I came up with a list of 7 things you can do in order to, not only scratch your creative itch, but also push your ideas forward in a corporate world.

1. Learn about the business

If you want to have a real impact, not only you must be good at your craft, and empathetic towards your end users, but you also have to understand the business, and what will make it successful. If you don’t, your design solutions will be short-sighted, not only it will be very difficult for you to push it through all the various stakeholders but also, your ideas might actually defeat the business model of your company. Let’s not be naive, it’s not just about what brings value to the user, it’s also about what will bring value to the business.

Calm down, put down the torches! I’m not telling you to disregard your users in favour of the business. I’m just alerting you for one of the toughest balancing acts you’ll have to do as a designer working in-house. Both sides of the equation must be considered, or else you either end up with unhappy costumers or without profit. I let you decide which one is worst.

2. Under promise but overdeliver

Working in-house is a bit less stressful than working for an agency, at least based on my experience, unfortunately I noticed that sometimes this leads some people to slack off and to become less productive. Deadlines are kind of self-imposed, therefore they are flexible and can be postponed.
However, I highly encourage you to keep up a good pace, no matter what.
Be fast even if there’s no urgency, this is how you get time to do more than what is expected, to dream a little higher and to try to raise the bar.

Personally, whenever I work on something, almost always I try to go one step beyond what was originally asked. Deliver what is expect but also question, “what if we had a few more weeks to build this?”, this doesn’t always work, because there’s just not enough time to build it, but almost always it leaves the seed that you might be able to collect later because a PM liked the idea and tried to push for it, or a developer decided to build it for fun during the weekend.

On top of that, and something which I personally think is super critical, this allows you to stretch your creative muscles, and show your team how much better the product could be.

3. Advocate for better

Pushing the boundaries is the first step, once you have ideas you need to take them out of your head and plant it in other people’s.

Why should you be doing this? First, because you’ll be able to improve upon your idea, because the more people see it and react on it, the more feedback you gather. This feedback empowers you to see things that you might have missed, and allows you to iterate and make it better and better.
Second, due to this iteration, your idea will transform and evolve to become someone else’s, the more people feel like they have ownership of an idea, the more likely it is that it actually ends up in the product.

4. Share what you know

In a company, it’s easy to recognise expertise on external parties, like a design agency, because you can see their body of work and they’re really great at making that look super impressive. However, as a designer working in a company, you might be considered less of an expert, just because you’re in-house — because if you were really that great in the first place, you would work for this awesome agency.

Even though that might actually be true in some cases, I think this is a bit of a fallacy, especially nowadays that companies who realise the value of good Design are actively hunting for the most talented designers.

A way I found to fight against this preconception is to share what you know with others, give a workshop on a design methodology or tool, teach people what you know, and not only you’ll start gaining their respect on that matter but also, you’ll notice that you’ll actually become better at that particular thing, because when you’re teaching, you’re also consolidating the knowledge for yourself.

As an example, one thing I did a little after I joined TomTom was to give a talk about animation principles and how these can be used to improve the User Experience, and little by little I started to see not only the awareness of my colleagues towards that subject increase, but also their respect for my view on the matter was more noticeable.

If you’re worried that you’re giving away your precious secrets, don’t be. This is a learning opportunity, just become better at it. The more you teach, the better you’ll become at it, moreover people will remember who the “expert” was who taught them this amazing new set of skills they just got.

5. Be kind

Working in a company where you’ll be interacting with lots of “muggles” who don’t know that Design is our truth lord and saviour, you will from time to time get that typical request to help out with “something visual”, which might not really have much to do with your actual job, however in these situations I believe in being kind and trying to be helpful.

Why would you even bother? For one, to make friends and more importantly to show people the power of Design.

For instance, if someone asks you to help out on a few slides for a presentation, (if you have the time, of course) try to help and don’t just do the work for them, give them some advice how they can achieve that on their own, or tell them why you did it in a certain way. My experience is that people will often be super thankful and even try to return the favour — remember, you have to learn about the business too — plus they will see you more and more as an expert at your craft, and will more likely respect your view and be curious about your ideas.

Think of it as part of the job, after all you need to build bridges with the people you work with, not walls.

6. Don’t be lazy

This goes a bit in hand with my second point, but this is so important to me that I wanted to reinforce it.
In a big company I find it’s quite easy to find excuses not to actually do something, or to delay it. Things like having to read ALL the emails (which will keep on coming), keeping up to the minute with all the slack channels in the company, ages in design inspiration websites, meetings about meetings, discussions about discussions, you name it… you know exactly what I’m talking about.

All this things are self-imposed obstacles in your way to get something done, and guess what, if you give yourself too little time to work on something, all you deliver will be in the best case scenario “just good enough”, and if you actually want to make a difference and grow, you will get frustrated by the fact that you can’t do more or that you don’t have the time to dream higher.

I understand lots of things are difficult to avoid, but you have to prioritise. For me, for the most part design always comes first, the rest comes second.
Do you think people will be mad because you skipped a meeting or took too long to reply on slack to get work done? I think not. — If they do, well, you might have to question yourself if you’re working in the right place.

This doesn’t mean you must isolate yourself from your team, you need to be aware and constantly discuss things, but don’t waste endless time talking about how you’re going to do this and that, and discuss it again and again instead of just doing something and then discuss it, now with something tangible to look at.

This also doesn’t mean I’m disregarding information which might affect my design because I’m too busy making it happen. I try to keep up-to-date as much as possible, but I also pick my battles. For instance, I skim through a lot of information (slack/emails/whatever) and identify what really deserves my attention and what can be read later.

My experience so far tells me that, if something is really urgent, I will most likely already know before I open my inbox. Because when it’s actually urgent, people tend to show up physically rather than sending emails.

7. Don’t give up

Believe me, I know how difficult it can be to row against the stream, but if you’re pushing for change and improvement that won’t happen overnight, especially on a big company. See it as a marathon, not a sprint. You’ve got to keep a constant pace that you can keep up all the way through it, so you can see yourself cross the finish line and get something you’re pushing for actually built into a product.

Just be aware that when you’re pushing for new ideas, most often than not they will be put on a side in favour of delivering something quick and cheap to the market, this doesn’t mean you should stop pushing for new things though, because the moment you stop pushing, your “cheap” design will now be the thing in question, where people will want to cut corners on.
Be mindful of the reality but keep trying to push the boundaries.

Is there a place for creativity in a corporate environment?

In my opinion, definitely! But you have to adapt, you’re not always surrounded by like-minded people, thus you need to truly understand the business you’re designing and at the same time become a design advocate and an educator, to bring everyone to the same page and spread the power of design to everyone you interact with.
Only then, people will recognise your expertise and realise how much value you can bring to the table.

Woah! You made it all the way to the end. Thanks for that! 🙏
Who says people don’t read anymore?

Since you’re here, my name is José Torre and I’m just a design loving designer born in Portugal, and about to move to Canada.

If you feel like talking, connect or just want to see what I’m up to, you can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Instagram.

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