Does every designer ultimately have to manage people? The IC Path
#73: Career development on the IC path
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Does every designer ultimately have to manage people? The IC Path
The first month of 2026 is already almost behind us. Many people have started working on their New Year's resolutions, while others are probably still in the planning phase. Among all kinds of goals and plans, those related to career growth often come up. We start thinking about how to move our careers forward, which areas we should focus on next, and what we really want to do to feel satisfied with our work.
That is why, with this article, I’m starting a series of articles focused on career development and the different directions you can take as you grow professionally. Together with experts, we will compare these paths, look at their pros and cons, and assess how well each one fits into the future of our industry.
To begin, we will take a closer look at the first possible direction, the IC role, also known as the individual contributor.
What defines the IC career path?
IC is a career path that allows you to grow as a designer and increase your impact on the product and the organization, without moving into management roles or people management.
Stages of growth on the IC path
The early stages of development on the IC path look very similar in many companies. For UX and Product Designers, they usually follow this progression:
Junior -> Mid-level → Senior
This is the point where it is worth pausing for a moment. It is the stage at which many designers decide to move into a management path, which we will cover in a separate article. Those who choose to stay on the IC path usually have the following growth options, depending on the organizational structure:
Senior → Staff → Principal → Distinguished
Sometimes you may also encounter roles such as Senior Staff or Principal Designer. This depends heavily on the specific organization and how it defines career progression.
Bonus: Super IC
The term Super IC is often used to describe designers at the Staff, Principal, or Distinguished levels who combine the highest level of expertise with a very strong organizational impact, while still remaining individual contributors.
What does this look like in practice?
If I had to describe the IC path in one word, it would be craft. By craft, I do not mean tool proficiency. I mean the ability to design and solve design problems at every stage of your career. Regardless of experience level, you continue to design and work through complex problems.
That said, craft is not the only area you need to develop in order to progress on the IC path. The proportion of time spent on craft compared to other skills also changes over time.
At the beginning of their careers, designers usually work on smaller and simpler problems that do not require a high level of independence or difficult decision-making. Responsibility is limited, and they are rarely involved in higher-level discussions. Contact with stakeholders is minimal or nonexistent. At this stage, designers should be mentored by more experienced colleagues to build their skills. They often focus more on individual artifacts than on their broader impact on the business or the organization. Project inputs are usually already well defined. They also learn how to give and receive feedback and how to work effectively within a team.
As your experience grows, the nature of your projects changes. You begin working on larger and more complex problems. You start gathering information on your own from different team members in order to build the context needed to design meaningful solutions. The balance between craft and other skills gradually shifts, which I will describe in more detail later in the article. Your communication skills and technical knowledge also continue to improve.
In practice, the core path from junior to senior looks similar across many organizations. This applies both to designers who plan to stay on the IC path and to those who eventually move into management. You can find more detailed perspectives on this stage in our other articles:
With additional years of experience, once you reach the senior level or beyond, you become an increasingly important member of the team with growing influence over strategic decisions related to design and product direction.
As an IC, you start participating in higher-level meetings where you represent the design function and the user perspective. These may include product or organizational planning and strategy discussions. Together with product managers, you collaborate on product strategy and take part in discovery and definition phases before moving into solution design.
Depending on the organization, you may be assigned as the lead designer on specific projects or products, taking responsibility for the overall UX and the delivery of business goals. In this role, you act as a subject matter leader, ensuring consistency and quality across the work of other designers.
Strong communication skills become essential as you collaborate with multiple teams and stakeholders and mentor less experienced designers.
From a design perspective, your work focuses on solving increasingly complex business and product problems. Systems thinking becomes critical, and you begin shaping new standards and processes within the organization. Projects at this level require careful communication to balance the needs of all involved parties.
You still design, but this typically takes up around 20 to 50 percent of your time. For a deeper look at this shift, I recommend reading this article.
At the Staff and Principal levels, your impact extends far beyond individual projects or products you are responsible for. You help shape design standards, define processes, and influence strategy across entire product areas or even the whole organization. You represent the user and design perspectives in the most important business decisions, often working directly with senior leadership, including VPs and the C-suite.
As you can see, the IC path allows designers to achieve significant influence over organizational direction, product strategy, and design outcomes, especially at senior and higher levels within the Super IC space. At the same time, it does not require moving into a management role. Design remains a core part of the job, even though it looks very different from what it did at the beginning of a career.
Areas and skills on the IC path
We have already briefly covered the characteristics of the IC path. Now I would like to take a closer look at the areas that appear along this path and the skills that develop within them at different levels.
When reviewing career matrices that describe expectations for different IC levels across various organizations, with links to selected examples included at the end of the article, it becomes clear that, beyond craft, additional areas appear at every level. These often include systems thinking, collaboration and communication, research, technical knowledge, and impact on the organization and other designers. Some of these have already been mentioned earlier.
Since organizations define areas and expectations in different ways, I would like to apply a certain level of generalization here. For the purpose of this article, I will focus on the following areas, along with a high-level overview of the skills they typically include:
Design Craft
Product Thinking
Collaboration & Communication
Impact & Execution
Leadership & Mentoring
Technical Knowledge
Design Craft
Design craft includes all core design activities such as visual design, interaction design, systems design, and prototyping.
At the beginning, this is mainly about mastering tools and basic methods. This includes correctness of components, attention to detail, fundamental design principles and patterns, information architecture, flow design, and the ability to explain and justify design decisions.
As experience grows, this evolves into building scalable design systems, caring for accessibility, and ensuring the highest quality of experience across the organization. From the senior level upward, ICs are characterized by a very high level of quality and consistency. They are able to design complex systems and define design standards for other designers.
Product Thinking
This area includes requirements definition, research, and participation in product vision and strategy. In many cases, designers are also expected to plan and conduct research activities.
At early stages, the key skill is understanding the problem and connecting user needs with business goals.
With increasing experience, this expands into work at higher levels. This includes co-creating product vision and direction, deciding which problems are worth solving, making conscious tradeoffs, thinking long term, and understanding the consequences of design decisions over time. As seniority grows, the partnership with product managers and business stakeholders becomes stronger and more equal.
Collaboration & Communication
This area fully focuses on communication skills and collaboration with other team members.
At every level, the ability to communicate design decisions clearly, receive feedback, and collaborate effectively with others is essential.
At more senior levels, this also includes facilitating workshops and design sessions, leading project discussions, engaging confidently with stakeholders, and giving high-quality feedback. Collaboration with both your own team and other teams across the organization is expected to be at a very high level.
Impact & Execution
This area reflects the impact your work has on the business and the organization, as well as how you execute your responsibilities.
At every level, you are responsible for completing tasks and delivering solutions that you take ownership of. Early on, this responsibility is smaller, but it grows with more complex and critical assignments.
As experience increases, you become better at thinking about the impact your solutions have on the organization and the business, rather than focusing solely on delivering screens or features. You improve your ability to prioritize, measure the outcomes of your design decisions, and work within constraints that you increasingly handle on your own.
Leadership & Mentoring
This area most often applies to designers at senior levels and above. It focuses on supporting the growth of less experienced designers, building the value of design within the organization, and educating other teams.
It also includes exploring, introducing, and promoting new ways of working and thinking, as well as identifying and adopting new tools and methods.
You may be involved in leading projects end-to-end as a design lead, conducting design reviews, making decisions at the team level, and supporting other designers in their work.
Technical Knowledge
The final area focuses on technical knowledge, which is an essential part of design work.
At lower levels, an IC should have a basic understanding of technology and awareness of implementation constraints through close collaboration with developers. This also includes knowledge of design tools.
As designers gain experience, they develop a deeper understanding of technical topics such as system architecture and technological limitations. They also expand their knowledge of emerging technologies, including areas like artificial intelligence. Strong collaboration with engineering teams is a key characteristic at this stage.
As mentioned earlier, I have intentionally generalized these areas and skills to present a broad view of the possibilities within the IC path. This does not mean that an IC must be equally specialized in every area or skill that an organization includes in its development framework. However, as experience grows, especially at staff and principal levels, solid knowledge across most of these areas is often expected.
Individual skill sets can also become a personal strength and may differ depending on whether the path applies to a designer, writer, or researcher. This is why it is difficult to present a universal skill set in a single article. At the end of this piece, I include links to several sources from larger organizations that show how they define areas and skills across different levels.
Can IC be a destination career path?
Absolutely. Staying on the IC path throughout your entire career is neither a better nor a worse choice. It is simply a different one.
The decision of whether to follow this path or move into a managerial role at some point depends on your preferences. It is also worth considering your natural predispositions, rather than treating management as the default next step.
It is important to remember that not every organization offers a fully developed IC career path. In many companies, the highest formal level is Senior Product Designer, which does not necessarily mean a smaller scope of responsibility or impact compared to roles such as Principal Designer. That is why it is worth understanding how IC progression looks in your current organization or in the company you plan to apply to.
We will cover the pros and cons of different career paths and how to choose the right one in upcoming articles. However, if you enjoy working on complex UX problems, diving into details, strategy, and system and technical logic, and you do not feel drawn to managing people, the IC path can be a very strong direction for your career.
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Mateusz’s LinkedIn
This is solid framework thinking. You’ve managed to be specific enough to be useful whilst acknowledging the reality that IC paths aren’t one-size-fits-all. The technical knowledge progression from constraint awareness to architectural understanding is particularly well articulated. The inclusion of organizational examples will make this even more actionable. Good work bridging theory and practice here.