How HR sees a designer’s career path — Thoughts about being a “senior designers”
I’ve spent 3 years of my 6-years as a product designer at SimilarWeb, a global company with 500+ employees that measures the traffic of the digital world. I’ve started there as a product designer in 2017, Promoted to senior product designer at 2018, then left to work as a contractor for Google for 9 months and came back to SimilarWeb as an individual contributor in the product design team.
Recently, as an effort to help designers grow and learn within the company and retain employees for longer, HR dept consulted me on building a guided “track” for advancing as a designer in the company.
At SimilarWeb we currently have four “levels” of designers: junior designers, designers, senior designers, and a design manager. Designers were traditionally promoted at certain pre-defined points in their careers, based on time in the field. Management was curious: aside for years of experience, what differentiates between a designer and a senior designer?
This article is meant for designers who work at medium-large organizations and want to learn more about what it means to grow as a designer within their organization.
One of the motivations of writing this was reading Helena Seo’s (DoorDash) “Designing” a Career Ladder for Product Design — where she described why these hierarchies and advancements are crucial both for designer and management.
Let’s discuss:
- The role HR plays in getting that coveted “senior”/”manager” title
- Why does HR care about your title?
- What is the level of influence a designer should have over the organization?
- How a designer defines “senior designer”?
- When it is time to find a job in a new organization?
HR came up with the designer’s four-step career path
What I learned from talking to HR about career development is: for HR, these different design titles are how they establish pay grades. There are plenty of designers straight out of school with the maturity, technical ability, and user-centric mindset of a more seasoned designer, but their lack of professional experience landed them in a junior position — with a junior salary.
(Same goes for designers with lots of years under their belts, but not a lot to show for it.)
Moving up the design totem pole is based on two factors: when your manager deems you ready for a pay bump, and when a more senior role opens up. Achieving senior roles is like playing musical chairs — the higher you climb, the more competitors there are for fewer seats.
The current state reflects an inability to quantify an individual’s contribution to the company, so HR goes for the most easily measurable thing — like years working for the organization or initial pay grade.
A new suggestion for seniority model: Design influencer
Having said that — here is a humble suggestion for a senior designer’s role description:
Seniority should reflect on the level of influence a designer has over the organization. If you are a senior designer that handles very small, unimportant tasks for the organization — you are not a senior designer.
Growing organically as a designer means influencing the organization in a more significant way — such as strategy, business goals, brand perception and workflows.
Also, it means working with an equally senior counterpart from the product and r&d division.
Here are 3 qualities that I think are important for what we call a design influencer:
- Understanding business goals
Being able to cooperate on a strategic level with product managers and product owners, optimize and prioritize for achieving business goals. If the product manager’s job is to take business needs and translate them into products and features, it’s the designer’s responsibility to understand and make sense of these requirements. - Flexible, adaptable and agile, an agent of change
Senior designers are often required to lead large changes in the company. The kind of people that you want beside you when changing strategy or creating a new product wouldn’t try to convince you that the old product/process is good and challenge if this change is even necessary. Optimize for the customer and business, while keeping the dev team happiness in mind.
This came to mind after reading Molly Nix’s (Airbnb) Defining Design Generalists — Exploring the skill set of an underrated superpower - Education and communication skills
Along with onboarding and supporting new designers, a design influencer would educate people in the organization on the design process. If a new product manager thinks that a designer’s job is to color in wireframe and draw pretty illustrations once the PM-mocks are done — it’s the design influencer’s job to communicate internally the importance of design process and methodologies, and how collaborative UX work makes the final outcome better.
Being a design manager vs. being a design lead
Sometimes I also need a reminder these are 2 different roles with different responsibilities- One is a pedagogical authority — more in the soft skills territory — making sure everyone is happy in their teams, hiring new designers and onboarding them and representing the design team in the metaphorical table whenever a roles and responsibilities dilemma occurs
The other is more of a professional authority — enforcing the design methodologies and workflows and the customer-centric mindset in the organization, determining any professional-related dilemma and most importantly — function as a professional touchpoint for the design team.
These 2 roles can be manned by a single person, but it’s rare to find someone with both the soft skills to be a good manager and communicator and the background and experience to be used as a professional authority.
You can read more about the lead VS manager paths in Alex Jones’s The Branching Career Path
Balance what you are naturally good at (and enjoy doing) with the needs of your organization
Nobody is going to promote you to a manager position that no one needs just because it’s the next level in your career path. Understand what the company needs right now and ask yourself what skills and services you can provide to solve that specific problem.
This relates to the Japanese concept of Ikigai — “a reason for being” — combining what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can get paid for.
If your organization has a problem onboarding new users, you can specialize and own the onboarding experience. If there is a need to align all data visualizations — you can take it on and create a design system for your charts and widgets. No one is going to say “please don’t solve that massive problem you identified, there isn’t a specific position for that”.
It’s about creating a position that fits both the organization and you. And if you can really shine in a particular field that isn’t that important for your organization — maybe it’s time to find a new organization. Eventually, you are going to get bored when you are not doing something you enjoy doing and you are good at.
Hope this random pile of thoughts has helped you with your career dilemmas, and you see yourself advancing in your organization in a direction that is right for you.
I would also love to hear about how a senior designer is defined in your organizations and what’s your responsibilities — who you work with and what’s your influence level on the organization
