The Path to Senior Product Designer: Why Seniority is More Than Just Years of Experience
How many years does it take to get from junior to senior product designer?
This question is wrong.
The path to seniority does not depend solely on years of experience.
It’s about a certain set of skills and behaviors that unlock the doors to promotion.
At least in some companies. But I will explain it in a moment.
It’s not about the years of experience
The number of years of experience being the only factor in deciding on promotions is a wide misconception.
I keep seeing people offended by other folks becoming senior designers at a relatively young age.
How is this possible that someone who’s career started in their early twenties is a senior designer at age of 25? They haven’t seen it all yet! They are not experienced enough!
Similarly, from the opposite angle, folks are willing to get promoted just because of their many years of experience. But in reality, they were not making a significant impact and didn’t grow through all these years.
Well, there’s nothing here to be offended about any of those.
So, how can one tell if they are ready to move to the next level of their career and become a senior product designer?
Career ladder
A career ladder is a guide prepared and owned by an organization. Its goal is to clearly communicate to its employees which skills they need to gain to be promoted—in other words, what it takes to jump to the next step of the ladder.
Below, you will find examples from a few companies that have such ladders:
Is this your first time seeing something like this? Well, they are not common for all organizations. Some companies, especially those with a really small design team, choose not to establish one.
These companies use slightly less obvious criteria to decide on promotions. These could include years of experience, a person's impact, or a major project that ends up being a big success.
Yet, this is very ambiguous and depends on the good intentions of an HR person and your supervisor.
However, even if you find yourself in such a company, it’s not the end of the world.
Studying the career ladder examples I provided will reveal many similarities. Together, they make a universal way to assess whether someone is ready to become a senior product designer.
If you are a junior or mid-level designer today, just by looking at the ladders, you can tell which of your skills need improvement. You can even make a career plan in which you list all the gaps and methods to fill them in.
Five areas of difference
I have studied the career ladders of different companies, spoken to other senior designers, and used my observations to distill five key factors by which one can tell the difference between a junior product designer and a senior product designer. You can use this list to assess your current position on the career ladder:
Project’s clarity
Scope size
Autonomy
Mentorship
Impact
Project’s clarity
A junior product designer usually would be tasked with clearer projects. Not much left to be discovered. Fewer questions would have to be answered, and less uncertainty to struggle with. Such projects would have quite a straightforward course and a little to no number of bumps on the road.
On the other hand, a senior product designer could easily take on his plate a project with much more ambiguity. More discovery would be needed. There might be some innovation involved. A lot of initial questions with no answers, with even more popping up along the way. The end state and the route to it are almost impossible to predict.
Scope size
Less experience means fewer items in scope. A junior product designer is usually tasked with smaller projects. These could be either a single feature or the whole application with a low level of complexity. The projects a junior product designer works on in the early days might be less prominent and less critical for the organization’s strategy.
On the contrary, a senior product designer can handle more complex projects. More items in scope and higher intricacy bring no fear to someone more experienced. The projects are way more advanced and critical for the company’s strategy. These might be the most used features, new features with immense potential, or the entire strategic applications.
Autonomy
Autonomous decision-making is almost nonexistent if we speak of a junior product designer. His experience, or rather the lack of it, limits his authority and ability to drive work autonomously. A junior product designer is, for the majority of the time, dependent on his supervisor and more experienced colleagues.
On the opposite, a senior product designer is trusted to make decisions in critical areas of his projects. The level of autonomy is much higher than that of a junior product designer.
Mentorship
A junior product designer is more focused on learning and consuming knowledge from more experienced peers than on teaching others. However, he is able to already give feedback to peers on their work.
More experience means more knowledge to share. A senior product designer must mentor his junior colleagues and advocate for product design best practices to his non-design peers and executives.
Impact
Taking into account the level of autonomy and the scope size of the projects that a junior product designer works on, the impact he makes is fairly limited. Smaller, non-strategic projects will be less impactful on the business and the organization.
A senior product designer's impact will be much bigger. By working on critical and more advanced projects, he will have a greater impact on the whole organization. One day, he might be able to challenge the status quo of a struggling business and help in finding new ways to grow financially.
Further reading
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An interesting one! I am wondering what do you think - how can companies ensure a fair and objective evaluation for promotions based on these 5 areas of difference you mentioned, especially in companies without a formal career ladder?
Jr. over here! I’ve only worked as a product designer at one company, so helpful to hear wisdom from a broader perspective. 👍