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Why do designers become managers?
Learnings from talking with 10 design managers from Booking dot com, Miro, Zalando, Smartsheet, and more.
The transition from an individual contributor to a manager is hard.
If you do a quick search on Google, you will probably find hundreds of training courses for improving design skills and mountains of generic management material, but there’s very little to support designers who want to become leaders.
A couple of years ago, Matej Latin launched a survey with over 150 designers participating, and he found that one of the main reasons why senior to lead level designers quit their jobs is due to lack of career progression. The reason is simple: as Matej pointed out in his article, for junior and senior designers there are plenty of job opportunities in a company, but for head of design or director of design, there’s often just one position in a company. In plain words, the more senior you get, the narrower your career path becomes and the more competitors you will have.
Given the findings of the survey and the lack of materials to support designers who want to become leaders, I became anxious about my own career and curious about why designers become managers, what their journeys were, and how they got there. Therefore, I started interviewing design managers over the past six months and simply asked the question, “Why did you become a manager?”
Here’s an article that summarizes the learnings from talking to 10 design managers from Booking.com, Miro, Zalando, Smartsheets, and more. I hope this article will give you a clearer picture of what you want to be in the future.
What drives a designer to become a manager?
Let’s start by answering the title of this article.
The most common answer from 60% of the design managers is “It just accidentally landed.”
The typical scenario is where their manager left the company and they are the most senior person in the team who can manage the team. Another scenario…
