Define your UX/UI design team’s career path

Summary

The content discusses the evolving nature of design roles within a UX/UI team and the importance of defining career paths that align with individual professional expectations and the needs of the product.

Abstract

The article emphasizes the need for a scalable and precise definition of career paths for a growing design team within the product design world. It highlights the shift from a single 'Designer' role to a diverse range of over ten specialized roles, such as UX Designer, UI Designer, and Accessibility Specialist, as of January 2024. The author, a DesignOps manager, shares their research process, which includes benchmarking against various sources, to understand the sprouting design roles. The article also addresses the challenge of adapting career paths to accommodate changing roles, using the example of integrating a UX writer with AI expertise into an e-commerce company's design team. It suggests that career paths should be informed by the professional expectations of the design team and the evolving product needs, rather than relying solely on traditional references. The author outlines steps for creating and iterating on career paths within a design team, including understanding the organic growth of roles, conducting interviews, defining responsibilities, and considering salary structures.

Opinions

The author believes that the context changes lead to an evolution in design roles, necessitating a reevaluation of career paths.
There is an emphasis on the importance of benchmarking and research to understand the diverse roles within design.
The article suggests that the traditional role of 'Designer' has expanded into more specialized roles due to the complexity of modern design challenges.
The author posits that career plans for designers must be adaptable to accommodate the changing nature of design roles.
The author opines that understanding the professional expectations of the design team is crucial for defining career paths.
It is implied that the integration of new roles, such as a UX writer with AI expertise, can be seen as an 'edge-case' that requires special consideration.
The author advises that career paths should not be based solely on past references but also on the current needs of the product and the team.
The article concludes with a pragmatic approach to defining career paths, including creating a sketch of organic growth, conducting interviews, and iterating based on feedback.
Salary considerations are acknowledged as important but are left to individual company policies.

If the context changes, the roles change.

Currently, I am focusing a lot on getting to know the different career paths that exist within the product design world to be able to define in a scalable and precise way the career paths of a growing design team.

DALL-E generated image

As a DesignOps manager, I have to follow the same procedures we have in design practices, and I’ve started with the benchmark phase: I’ve already done more than 70 posts, the odd message to colleagues, a few Spotify episodes, and the odd YouTube video. And, honestly, since I started the research phase until today, it seems that the different design roles are sprouting from the branches.

A few years ago, we could talk about ‘Designer’ and we all understood that the same person designed the experience, and the interface, and they were in charge of accessibility, content, prototyping… everything design related, well. However, as of January 2024, we can list more than 10 design roles:

UX (User Experience) Designer: focuses on product usability and overall user experience.

UI (User Interface) Designer: focused on the visual aspect and interactivity of the user interface.

Interaction Designer: works specifically on how users interact with the product.

Visual or Graphic Designer: focuses on visual elements such as colors, images, and typography.

Information Architect: organizes information and content logically and understandably.

UX Researcher: conducts research to understand user needs and behaviors.

Accessibility Specialist: ensures that digital products are accessible to all users, including those with disabilities.

Prototyper: creates rapid prototypes to test and iterate on design ideas.

Animation and Motion Specialist: designs and creates animations to enhance user interaction.

Product Designer (PD): expert user experience and interface designer with business strategy skills.

AI Specialist: create smarter and more adaptive user experiences, using machine learning algorithms and data processing.

and of course…

12. DesignOps Manager (DOM — I made up the acronym — ): responsible for optimizing and improving the processes and workflows of the design team.

Among others.

Knowing that we are facing a world of changing roles, we have to be aware that the career plan for designers must also be changing.

Let’s take the example of a design group of 10 people working for an e-commerce company. Until last year they didn’t have a UX writer (a role we could add to the list above) and today we need to add one. When hiring this person, we found out that he is a specialist in Artificial Intelligence (which is a plus). We have just added a double profile, very necessary today due to the characteristics of our product, and whose usual trajectory is unknown (because there is no habit).

This scenario could be treated as an ‘edge-case’, i.e., an unusual situation that may include unexpected user/context behaviors.

As a result of this edge case, what we observe is that the trajectories of the roles do not depend on the career paths themselves and what is expected of each role, but rather on what each person expects from their evolution.

In other words, nowadays, and for the definition of career paths for your design team, it is not enough to make use of the references of other plans, it is necessary to know the professional expectations of your design team and the needs of your product, without forgetting the new design trends that will change the design context and, therefore, the career paths as a whole.

Applying the theory

Let’s choose the prime example: the maturity of your design team is not very high and the team has grown without a definition of career paths.

Create a first sketch of the career path that has been created organically: the designer who was a junior 3 years ago, what has changed to be a middle, what responsibilities do the design leaders have compared to the principals?

Conduct interviews with the designers and the design leader: know not only the designers’ expectations but also what the company expects from the design team and future strategic objectives.

Define the current basic responsibilities of each level: there will be designers who take more responsibilities than necessary for their role, and for this, you will have to create intermediate levels within each of the reference levels (junior, middle, senior).

Generate the necessary positions for the team even if they are not filled: you will need a joint vision of the whole team to diagnose the current needs of each position.

Iterate the process after feedback seasons (those moments every quarter or 6 months when leaders and designers stop for a moment to evaluate progress and expectations).

I know that a very important step remains: the salary. I don’t go into this, because every company is different, but yes, salaries should be common and proportional to the responsibility and location of each person. I leave this to you.