Startup vs Tech Giant vs Agency: What Is the Best Place to Grow Professionally in Design?
If you are starting your design career or thinking about what is next, you are maybe wondering if joining a big company (like Google, Uber, Dropbox) or a startup (20 -200 people) or maybe a design agency will be better for your career and professional growth.
I have worked at an agency and with startups for a long time and am now working with Google. I am familiar from the inside with each environment and wanted to share my perspective on what each of them can bring to your design life.
Startup
Mid-size startup could be a very good starting point if you just graduated or have switched to product design from another profession.
The best scenario is when the team already has a senior designer (often it could be a founding designer) so you will have an amazing opportunity to learn from them and create a lot of good and bad designs, get feedback and grow quickly. Most likely you will be doing user research, tracking product metrics and often you may be working very closely (or directly) with the CEO which means you will be involved in shaping the product vision, which is super exciting.
Apart from that, often you will be doing all types of design work beyond product — you maybe asked to create an ad banner for the marketing team, design rollup for expos, work on websites, create fun swags for your team etc.
Overall, I think startups open up great opportunities to try yourself in different roles across the design process and better understand yourself — what you love and what you hate designing.
Additionally it is much easier to get a job offer from a startup, especially in Silicon Valley. They are competing with the huge giants and often can’t offer you the same level of compensation which mean competition is a bit lower. Apart from that, based on my experience, sometimes startups’ founders don’t know how to hire designers — they are pro in hiring engineers because this is where all things start, and designers are a closed book for them. So they will be relying more on their intuition and the potential they see in you and less on a rigorous interview process and your past experience.
Agency
I think working in agencies could be beneficial at the beginning of your design career. Usually you have an opportunity to get your hands dirty and work on different problem spaces and product domains. It is never boring and each new project is like a new life — you are starting from learning a completely new domain, building relationships with new teams, widening your horizons and diving into new unknowns. You have design team around you and you can learn from the team, get feedback and ask for help.
As a downside often once a product has launched you won’t control what happens with it, you will have less opportunities to see how your designs perform in the real world. After a while you may stuck in the “agency’ mindset with the client driving lots of design decisions and agency designers just executing them.
Tech Giant
Your experience will vary depending on the project you have joined, your team and the overall company design culture.
Working in a big company has its own specifics — you need to collaborate with many people outside of your immediate team, make sure all stakeholders are aware of decisions you are making and get their buy in. Usually you will be creating less and talking more. This is fantastic opportunity to grow your leadership skills, become pro in communication and create products at scale.
Also even if you are the only designer in your team, you still have the power of the whole design team and lots of opportunities to learn and grow professionally: find a mentor, ask to access someone’s source files or design documentation and learn from that.
It is hard to get an offer from a big tech company if you are at the beginning of your design career (exceptions — designers who got a chance to work as interns). So don’t waste your time if you are just starting, apply for a big company when you have 3+ years of experience and a solid portfolio with 2 impressive products you have designed.
Visual summary
The diagram below aims to answer two questions:
- What is the best place to understand what I love and what I hate designing?
- What is the best place to grow professionally?
As you can see, a tech giant will be a great place for growth but you may not have a lot of freedom to try your hand across different phases of the design process and most likely you will be growing your skills towards one specialization. In the beginning of your design career I believe it is great to have more diverse experience and startups provide better opportunities for that.
Please note that this summary is my subjective approximation of what each environment could look like. It may vary from company to company. For example, an agency could provide lots of opportunities to experiment and if a startup has a big design team, the mentorship parameter will be much higher.
Do your research and choose wisely!
