From Intern to Senior. Part 2: Design process, project scope, tooling, and 1-on-1 meetings at different career stages
#59: What career ladders won’t tell you about differences between various career levels.
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From Intern to Senior. Part 2: Design process, project scope, tooling, and 1-on-1 meetings at different career stages
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.
Two weeks ago, in part 1, I covered the first three areas:
🎯 Strategic thinking
🤝 Engagements
📃 Definition of design
Today, in part 2, I’m covering the remaining four areas:
👨🎨 Design process
🗺️ Scope and ambiguity of projects
🛠️ Tooling
👩💻 1-on-1 meetings
Let’s delve into each in more detail.
👨🎨 Design process
“What does your design process look like?” This kind of question is often asked during job interviews for design roles. Depending on the seniority of the role and the interviewee's experience, the answer will vary. Less experienced designers tend to follow the process they were taught in design university courses or boot camps quite strictly. More experienced designers tried it out and already know it’s not that simple.
1️⃣ Intern
As an intern product designer, you were taught that the first thing to do is to learn about the user's pain points as much as possible. You identify user personas, map out their feelings and thoughts on an empathy map, and begin to think about potential solutions. You write down some user stories, create an MVP, design a beautiful prototype, and prepare a scenario for a task-based usability study to validate the viability and usability of your solution.
Looking great on paper, but there’s a catch that you’ll learn it (hopefully not) the hard way quite soon.
2️⃣ Junior
As a junior product designer, you are beginning to understand that every project you are assigned is a bit different, and sometimes there’s no need to include every single step from the ideal design process you were taught back in the day. Because you are not experienced yet, and your level of working independently is still relatively low, the projects you are working on aren’t necessarily complex, and a lot of decisions must be consulted with your senior buddy.
Also, you often jump too quickly into the solutions space, not spending enough time on trying to understand the underlying issues, customer needs, and users’ pain points.
3️⃣ Mid-level
As a mid-level product designer, you are feeling more and more comfortable working alone on projects with higher complexity. You already know that a design process needs to be quite flexible and adapted individually to each project. You are better and better at juggling research, writing, cross-functional collaboration, and pushing pixels in multiple projects at once.
You spend less and less time on the solutions side of things, making a variety of exercises to understand the problem first.
4️⃣ Senior
As a senior product designer, you juggle multiple projects without much of a hassle. You are more than aware that an ideal design process looks great on paper, but in real life, it doesn’t make much sense. Was it invented only to teach new designers? Maybe. If yes, something’s wrong with it, and it’s a pity no one is telling them that once they get hired, the design process will look very different. But you have already passed that and made your realization that the more time you spend on understanding the problem, the higher the chance of closing the project successfully.
So, you wear the detective’s hat quite often, chasing stakeholders, users, customers, engineers, and customer success reps to gain the big picture and do your job well. Then, or in the meantime, you write about the problem, trying to break it down and distill its core. You invite non-designers to work with you on ideation. After that, you use your favorite design or vibe coding tool to create a prototype that you’ll later validate with your customers and users. The handoff is invisible, but you already know that from this article.
🗺️ Scope and ambiguity of projects
I covered some elements of this area in one of my previous articles, which was primarily focused on why years of experience don’t matter much when it comes to decisions about promotion.
The project’s scope and level of ambiguity are highly correlated with the designer’s experience and their level of independence. Less experienced designers are more likely to be assigned projects with a small scope and a low level of ambiguity, as they are not yet ready to make important decisions independently, haven’t worked on similar projects long enough, and are still in the process of learning how to ask the right questions.
1️⃣ Intern
As an intern product designer, you are assigned to projects with a low level of ambiguity and a relatively small scope. The reason for that is quite simple. These are your baby steps in the role, and you are still learning the craft. You don’t know where to look for the answers, nor how to ask good questions to find them. As a result, you need quite heavy guidance from more senior colleagues to complete your tasks.
2️⃣ Junior
As a junior product designer, you are now taking more confident steps, but you are still like a toddler. Both scope and ambiguity are more or less the same as on the previous level. Perhaps the scope is a bit larger in terms of size, but in terms of requirements coming from your product manager, they are quite clear, and there isn’t much that needs to be discovered. However, you may start assisting your PM and more senior colleagues with some product discovery activities.
3️⃣ Mid-level
As a mid-level designer, you are beginning to operate more independently and make important calls without much guidance. The projects you are being assigned to are more and more complex and unclear. You need to incorporate a significant amount of research and discovery exercises to find answers to close projects, which are, at the same time, much bigger in scope and last much longer.
4️⃣ Senior
As a senior product designer, you feel quite comfortable in making important design decisions. You work on highly ambiguous projects with a large scope. It wouldn’t be surprising if you were overseeing a very large area of a product, an entire product, or even multiple small products.
Chasing stakeholders and other members of your organization for the answers is your bread and butter. You quite often wear a hat of a detective, and you are quite good at connecting the dots. Sometimes what you’ve got to work with are just shreds of information, but you are experienced enough and have high agency to make good use of them.
You are a strategic partner to your product manager and tech lead, and together, you drive product discovery. Some would say that you are one level higher in looking for answers, as the projects you might be working on haven’t even been discovered. That’s you and the remaining two folks from your product trio to identify those opportunities.
🛠️ Tooling
For the past couple of years, I’ve been observing a concerning trend among designers who are overly focused on tooling. I’m not alone here. Artiom Dashinsky, a designer and book author, coined the term “Figmaism,” which refers to the discussion in our industry that is too heavily focused on tools and the visual aspects of design, resulting in a shallow understanding of the impact our role can have.
Around a year ago, during an interview, I asked Miranda Slayter from
, what her take is on this trend. She quite accurately pointed out that the less experienced a designer is, the more obsessed they tend to be with tools and the visual aspect of their work.While tools are essential for our work, they are not everlasting. What’s evergreen? Our skills such as problem-solving, facilitation, empathy, and creating something meaningful from essentially nothing.
1️⃣ Intern
As an intern product designer, you spend around 90-95% of your time in Figma. It’s not really your tool of choice, but a standard app that dominated the market in recent years. Has your interest in product design started with Figma? There’s a high chance that it was the case. The remaining 5-10% of your time is spent in a document editor, where you try to break down the problems before jumping into solutions, which most likely is something you’re still learning.
2️⃣ Junior
As a junior product designer, you are still heavily focused on the visual side of things, and as a result, you love Figma and try to master its every workflow, plugin, and creative trick. 80% of your time in this tool would be an accurate guess. Everything else is split between a document editor of your choice and various research and analytics tools, such as Hotjar, Amplitude, and Dovetail.
3️⃣ Mid-level
As a mid-level product designer, you are starting to realize that visuals are not everything in this job, so you cut your time in the design tools, such as Figma. My guess would be that you spend around 50% of your time there. The remaining half involves talking, writing, mapping, and performing other activities to understand the needs of customers, businesses, and users’ pain points. You are increasingly using analytics tools.
Additionally, you are starting to become interested in tomorrow's design tools, such as Lovable, v0, and Replit (which many refer to as "vibe coding" apps), and trying to figure out how to incorporate them into your workflow.
4️⃣ Senior
As a senior product designer, you spend maybe a quarter of your time in design tools. There’s a big shift in this department compared to your time as an intern or a junior. You no longer explore the visual side of things this much, as you know, there are many more important aspects of user experience beyond the user interface.
You may have already tested some vibe coding tools and incorporated them into your ideation and prototyping phases of the design process.
The majority of your time is spent in three categories of tools: whiteboarding (FigJam, Miro, Lucid) as you facilitate workshops, document editors (Google Docs, Microsoft Word, NotebookLM), as you constantly wear a detective’s hat conducting numerous interviews, and presentation editors (PowerPoint, Google Docs, Figma Slides) for creating slide decks that help you communicate your big ideas with stakeholders and the commercial team.
👩💻 1-on-1 meetings
Regularly meeting with your line manager is vital for both of you. For them, it’s necessary to gauge whether you are making progress in both your tasks and your career in general. They also need these meetings to discuss potential issues and offer you their help in fixing them. For you, as a designer, the needs and topics to be discussed during these meetings will vary depending on where you are in your career ladder. I made this observation in recent years while leading several interns and junior designers in various companies. How different these meetings could be? Let’s find out.
1️⃣ Intern
As an intern product designer, almost a hundred percent of the time you spend on meetings with your manager is focused on your tasks, which influences your growth. Of course, somehow, you are building a relationship with them, discussing non-work-related topics to maintain a healthy level, but because you are relatively inexperienced, you need a ton of feedback and direction on your work.
2️⃣ Junior
As a junior product designer, your main need remains the same as it was a while ago: you need feedback and direction on your work, so for the majority of time, you’ll be presenting your day-to-day projects and asking if that’s done the right way.
After your first promotion, you are hungry for more, so you’re starting to get interested in the mid-level role. How’s it different from your current role? What do I need to learn and achieve to get there soon? Your line manager may set specific goals for you that will guide you toward getting the promotion. As a result, a portion of your 1-on-1 meetings may be used to discuss these goals and check their progress.
3️⃣ Mid-level
As a mid-level product designer, you’re becoming increasingly independent, which has an impact on your 1-on-1 meetings with your line manager. You don’t discuss your current work in such fine detail as you used to do. Strategic thinking is something that pops up more and more frequently on your plate, so you’re most likely discussing what your team will be up to not next week, but next quarter.
You are starting to collaborate with people from different teams and departments more heavily to do your job, so you’ll seek advice on how to make connections with non-designers, engage with stakeholders, and talk to folks from the commercial team so they understand you (spoiler alert: they don’t care about your design system, tokens, or the double diamond process). You most likely have some quarterly goals set up that you’re trying to achieve to continue your growth.
4️⃣ Senior
As a senior product designer, you are more strategy-oriented than ever. There’s a minimal chance that you need to spend your half-hour slot with your manager to walk them through your day-to-day projects (if that’s the case, something’s wrong, it’s called micro-management, and it’s either your line manager or your entire organization). You'd rather juggle two major themes in your 1-on-1 meetings: strategic outlook and leadership.
If you are a senior designer willing to grow even further, there are two paths ahead of you: IC and managerial. Both require leadership skills in some way. You may not have any direct reports if you stick to the IC path, but you’ll be leading by example and overseeing the use of good practices. You are likely spending a significant portion of your time with your manager preparing for any of these roles.
Additionally, if you already lead a group of designers without holding the right title yet, which is quite common in this industry, you report on their progress and the strategic initiatives of the group.
The other part of the time, you use to talk strategy. What’s the focus of your product team (or multiple product teams if you oversee many products) in the next quarter in fine detail, and what else is being considered to be discovered and developed in the 6-12 months outlook? Your manager should be there to help you find resources and connections to hit the strategic goals.