From Intern to Senior. Part 1: Strategic thinking, engagements, and definition of design at different career stages
#57: What career ladders won’t tell you about differences between various career levels.
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From Intern to Senior. Part 1: Strategic thinking, engagements, and definition of design at different career stages
Mature organizations use career ladders to assess whether an employee is exceeding their job expectations and ready for promotion. These ladders typically encompass several areas of skills and provide a precise indication of whether someone is close to being promoted or if they should focus on improving in certain areas.
Last year in episode 12th, I covered the basics of career ladders for designers:
While career ladders are great for giving a sense of the differences between each level, which can be extremely helpful for designers who have recently started their careers, they don’t cover all aspects of our work. Career ladders don’t explain how the definition of design evolves at each level, how the ratio of time spent on design tools versus other activities changes, or how differently 1-on-1 meetings look at each level.
In this two-part article, I’m looking at designers’ career levels from unusual angles. I’m covering some real differences between the levels that aren’t captured by most career ladders. To give this comparison a bit of structure, I split my thoughts into seven main areas:
🎯 Strategic thinking
🤝 Engagements
📃 Definition of design
👨🎨 Design process
🗺️ Scope and ambiguity of projects
🛠️ Tooling
👩💻 1-on-1 meetings
In part 1, I’m covering the first three areas. Next week, in part 2, I’ll cover the remaining four areas.
If you are not already subscribed to Fundament, don’t hesitate to do it now so you won’t miss Part 2 next week!
🎯 Strategic thinking
It should not be shocking to everyone that designers at lower career levels have little in common with strategy. The term strategy could be a little intimidating or mysterious for interns, juniors, and even mid-level product designers. Does strategy happen in some secret room where designers have no access?
Not at all.
Strategy is simply planning further ahead.
Planning instead of just reacting.
For designers, strategic thinking could mean getting involved more in shaping OKRs during quarterly planning, driving innovation for new initiatives through design methodologies such as design thinking or design sprints, and simply asking better questions at different stages of the design process to better understand users, stakeholders, and peers in order to deliver something that brings positive change.
Miranda Slayter from
has recently put a fantastic short article about getting started with strategic thinking for designers:
Let’s now examine what it looks like on each level of a career ladder:
1️⃣ Intern
As an intern product designer, you are most likely being told quite precisely what needs to be done. Further context might be provided, but usually just enough to understand why without going super deep, not to overwhelm you. As a result, your approach to work is almost 100% tactical, which is absolutely fine at this level.
2️⃣ Junior
As a junior product designer, you are still primarily focused on executing tasks that your PM or more senior designers have asked you to do. Strategy isn’t yet on your plate as you shall focus more on leveling up in other areas, such as user research, visual design, interaction design, and collaboration.
3️⃣ Mid-level
As a mid-level product designer, you are beginning to think strategically and ask questions early. Why are we doing this? Is this the best way to address the customer’s pain points? How does this fit into the bigger picture of what we are trying to achieve as an organization? This is the right time to make a mental switch, stop panicking about the term strategy, and start contributing more to prioritization discussions.
4️⃣ Senior
As a senior product designer, you are expected to be a strategic partner to your product manager, tech lead, and other product team members. You look at the problems from different angles and what’s most important from a helicopter view. You consider how your decisions affect the long-term game of your organization. Contribution to shaping this long-term game is something that starts popping up on your plate more and more often.
🤝 Engagements
The circle of people you work with continually evolves as you grow. Because when you become a mid-level designer, your role changes, and you start doing slightly different things than when you were an intern or a junior designer. As a result, to do your job well, you end up forced to speak to a very different set of colleagues from your organization.
The most dramatic change occurs when an individual contributor becomes a manager. From this moment forward, they are expected to spend more time with stakeholders and C-level team members than with their direct reports. If you aspire to reach this level at some point, please bear this in mind.
However, in this article, I will focus only on IC roles. Let’s explore how engagements evolve between intern, junior, mid-level, and senior designers.
1️⃣ Intern
As an intern designer, you should have at least one work friend: your buddy, who is usually a more senior designer, helping you figure out how to crack various aspects of this job. Additionally, you are at the square one of collaborating cross-functionally with engineers and product team members.
2️⃣ Junior
As a junior designer, you feel quite confident in discussing your tasks, ideas, and artifacts with engineers and product managers. You speak to the end users of your product or leverage insights gathered by other teams (such as the user research team, customer support team, or commercial team). You still have a good relationship with a more senior designer (or multiple of those) that you learn from the most.
3️⃣ Mid-level
As a mid-level designer, you still work very closely with engineers and a product manager from your team. You may occasionally need to communicate with engineers from other product teams if your product has dependencies on other pieces of the puzzle within your organization’s ecosystem. As you become more involved in shaping strategy and making a business impact, you start to engage with business stakeholders. You feel confident in planning user research activities and speaking to the users.
4️⃣ Senior
As a senior designer, you are a master of cross-functional collaboration. You work with folks from departments across the board, from engineering, through sales, up to C-level people. You often wear a detective's hat, looking for information needed to complete your tasks in various places, both inside and outside the organization. You feel pretty confident in discussing strategy with stakeholders. By no means, you still co-operate very closely with your product team members. In addition, as a more experienced colleague, you may become a mentor to an intern or junior designer and share some of your priceless knowledge with them. You finally go very horizontal.
📃 Definition of design
The incentives for starting a career as a product designer for most of us circle around a few themes. It’s either that we wanted to change the world into a better place for humanity through design, we felt artistic in our childhood (but not enough to become serious visual artists), or we wanted to be makers in the digital space, but weren’t necessarily skilled at coding.
Whatever your motive, if you are in this game long enough, you will notice that your perspective on the role of a product designer and the entire design industry evolves. The same as the definition of design.
1️⃣ Intern
As an intern designer, you spend most of your time in design tools such as Figma. You are being told what needs to be done, and you (hopefully) follow the instructions to create mockups, wireframes, charts, and prototypes that your engineering team will use to build functionalities.
Your definition of design is most likely very close to:
Design dictates what it looks like and is a helpful guide for engineering teams in building functionalities for our users.
2️⃣ Junior
As a junior designer, you still spend the majority of your time in the design tools, fighting with components and trying to lay them out in the most usable and beautiful way before handing it over to the engineering team. However, you start to question your tasks and speak to the users. You think more and more about why you and your team build what you build. You also begin to consider how your decisions influence the lives of your users.
Your definition of design is somewhat close to:
Design is a tool enabling a nice user experience through beautiful and elegant customer-facing interfaces.
3️⃣ Mid-level
As a mid-level designer who has gained some experience, you are starting to realize that you weren’t hired to just draw lovely rectangles in Figma. You joined your organization to solve not only the users’ pains but also to figure out how your organization can capitalize on design. As you begin to gain traction in moving to the strategic end of the tactical-strategic spectrum, you can demonstrate a meaningful impact on the business.
Your definition of design is now very close to:
Design combines the interests of business, users, and engineering in an elegant and usable way.
4️⃣ Senior
As a senior designer who has already seen it all, you only spend a fraction of time on moving rectangles in Figma. The majority of your work is split between exploring customer needs and business problems, as well as identifying their root causes. Additionally, you think strategically about which problems are worth solving now and how to solve them in a way that maximizes your organization's potential. In some organizations, you may be responsible for driving innovation and exploring opportunities for new products and offerings in collaboration with your product manager.
You know exactly why you were hired, and that dictates your definition of design, which most likely is close to:
Design is a strategic component for solving business problems and driving innovation while keeping the good interest of users in mind.
Part 2 of this comparison, including 👨🎨 Design process, 🗺️ Scope and ambiguity of projects, 🛠️ Tooling, and 👩💻 1-on-1 meetings, comes to Fundament next week. Subscribe now and don’t miss it!