Design thoughts
Career progression for (Senior) Product Designer
A food for thought about career path, contribution, and growth.
If you started out as junior designer, evolving and earning your way up into mid-level and eventually a senior designer, you probably are familiar with the feelings of going through each day outside your comfort zone. I remember exactly how it felt. From feeling clueless of not knowing what to do, taking one challenges after the other, into presenting into different stakeholders and finally have my own voice as a designer — those years were both hard but at the same time so fruitful and productive.
Fast forward to years later when everything seems easier: you know your way around with Figma and other design tools, you feel comfortable around the stakeholders, your workflow are clear and you rarely feel challenged anymore. There’s nothing wrong with it, despite the fact that you have found stability in your work. Stability might mean comfort zone and contentment, but stability might also mean feeling stuck and eventually you stop growing.
A research conducted by Yale neuroscientists proved that stability triggers some part of human brains to stop growing. To paraphrase, humans are meant to live with instability in order to progress. To a certain extent, being a senior designer brings you to some degrees of stable and secure career flow, but then you might ask, what’s next? Some of my peers started to feel demotivated, and some thinks that they need to move to other companies in order to feel that urge of learning again. In a conversation that I had with fellow senior designers, we can’t help but feeling a little bit lost. Aiming for design lead seems like a pretty heavy responsibility (and probably pretty long way), but if not, then what now?
Below, I compiled some things that you can do to boost your productivity as a senior designer (or a mid-level designer):
- Think about your career path right away. (Not tomorrow, not later. Now.) There are usually two types of career progression for a senior product designer. You can choose to either pursuing managerial position or individual contributor (IC) position. Those career branch are completely different things and you should take your time to think of which way to go. Managerial position (Design Manager, Design Lead, etc.) will involve a lot of people’s skills, management, and leadership. In between, you might need to let go of your time to design and focus more of your time to grow the team. Meanwhile, IC position (Principal) will involve a lot of deep design and practical skills. You will focus your time to make strategic decision on how to improve the design quality or design flow within the organization. To be able to think about your career path since early stage will help you determine which area to focus and which area to improve.
- Think about how to contribute If you think you already have a proper and stable design flow within your day-to-day job, you communicate well with the stakeholders, and your skill is probably not questionable, then it’s the perfect time to contribute. Contribution can mean sharing what you can, teaching, or even initiating a positive change for the organization. Some of the activities that you can do: - Mentoring: nurture a junior designer or join a design mentorship community such as ADPList, Mentorcruise, and so on. - Teaching: think about your fortes and create a comprehensive documentation/ learning program on how to pass that knowledge to others. - Create systems/ guidelines: reflect on your past mistakes as a product designers and create a guideline to improve the workflow/ cross-collaboration based on your own experience.
- Think about how to grow yourself as a person Forget your current projects or your day-to-day responsibility. Outside from that, what do you want to improve? Are there any long-abandoned wish list that you kept somewhere? It can be anything from creating your own web to having a dedicated time to read a book. Spare sometime to grow yourself and get outside from your comfort zone. Some of things that you can do: - Write and document things (your past projects, your portfolios, your design knowledge) through blog posts/ medium posts like this. - Grow a hobby. Pick one and be really really good at it. - Learn something completely new. It can be a language or a software, anything to ignite the eagerness to learn in you.
So yes, a career progression does not always mean a promotion or a change in job title. It can also mean an evolution of perspective, a gain of maturity and wisdom, a willingness to contribute, or an investment of growth.
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