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Fixing product design career paths with the Mirror Model

Ryan Ford
UX Collective
Published in
10 min readNov 1, 2022
If you don’t want to read, here’s the whole model up front.

Product Design career paths are broken. Fundamentally and inextricably. Not out of malice, but out of no constant and clear drum beat; nobody noisily shouting with vigor that “our career paths are broken!” It’s time somebody said it, so why not us?

If you’re here, you’re most likely a designer, a manager, or an enthusiast. And you’re probably wondering how these career paths are actually broken: In what way, and from whose point of view? Furthermore, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that by now, even if they were broken, some company somewhere would have resolved the issue by developing a clear, consistent, and fair model that rewarded both Creators and Managers?

Seemingly, no.

Product Designers’ job pathways disproportionately emphasize an upward trajectory that leads to management. This leads to an industry that stifles the careers of highly-creative people who don’t want to manage, putting their personal and professional growth on hold because no appropriate role exists for them to grow into. These people get maxed out at the Principal Product Designer level (even at Meta) and feel handcuffed to their current role or feel forced to jump ship to earn more money and recognition.

This begs the question: what would a fair leveling model for Product Designers look like, in…

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Ryan Ford

Designer, Design Leader, Advisor & Mentor. Helped build Chime, Crunchyroll, Deviantart, and more internet treasures.

Responses (14)

What are your thoughts?

Refreshing take and wonderful proposal.

Binary track options (manager vs IC) is indeed outdated - and, imo, unfairly stigmatized to an extend.

For example, moving from VP/Head of Design role to more IC-oriented position might be now viewed as a…

and potential paths to Chief Design Officer

There's one challenge - at some point an IC that hits the top of the IC path before going for the C role lacks direct experience in managing people. I've seen and experienced countless situations where C level have little to no people skills to…

Awesome crystallization of some loose ideas tossed about for years by many of us to address a very relevant and personally essential problem.