Gabriel Tomescu

Design Career Tracks

Carving simple yet differentiated career tracks

As a people manager and hiring manager, I often get the question: “What does your company’s design career growth path look like?”.

I love receiving this question because it tells me the designer has a growth-mindset. They are looking toward the future, they are ambitious, goal-driven, and are not afraid to ask about opportunities available to them down the road.

The answer to this question is different based on the company, the design industry, and the designer’s personal ambitions.

1. The size and maturity of the company often dictates the number of career levels, specializations, and focus areas. For example, at a start-up, you might encounter 2-3 levels, from Junior, to Intermediate, to Senior. At jumbo-sized companies like Google, you may see up to 7 or more levels for individual contributors alone, and specializations like research, product design, creative, and design operations.

2. The design industry as a whole is still wrestling with standardizing career levels (but we’re getting better at this). A Senior Designer at company A might be seen as an Intermediate at Company B, a Head of Design at Company Y might be seen as a Senior Manager at Company Z, and so on.

3. Craft designers often face a “ceiling” in terms of impact and scope. Too often they are faced with moving into people roles as a way to increase their scope (and often pay), or face stagnation by staying in their current level indefinitely.

Dual-track career model

During my time at Properly, I created a dual-track framework for design growth, inspired by tracks at industry leaders like Atlassian, Intercom, Dropbox, Etsy, and others. I also found Org Design for Design Orgs by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner very insightful and practical for shaping career tracks.

1. Craft – Focusing on the practice of design, including competencies like User Interface, Visual Design, Research, Prototyping, and Copywriting.

2. People – Focusing on people management, including recruitment, coaching and mentoring, team and capability building, performance reviews, strategic and commercial thinking, and helping others level up their individual growth.

One of the challenges with a dual track model is how to structure compensation and stature in a company between craft and people roles. I often hear from craft designers that they want more influence and responsibilities as they reach senior ranks, but have no interest in managing people. How can we set up craft designers for success and long-term career growth without creating a “glass ceiling”?

I believe that craft and people roles should be seen as parallel, not stacked on top of each other. I would prefer to separate roles between the two disciplines. This can avoid craft designers feeling lesser than their people counterparts, or feel that their ladder only goes up to some arbitrary point.

Key differences between levels

Now that we’ve established dual tracks, the next question I hear from designers is “How can I advance to the next level?” My primary goal when faced with this question (usually around performance reviews), is to provide a clear and concise framework that articulates the key differences between levels. I love hiking and I found this mountain climbing analogy from Peter Merholz (see below) very fitting and easy to articulate to designers.

I combine this framework with specific examples of the designer’s behaviours in the past six months, highlight 1-3 areas to focus on next, and co-create a growth plan for the next six months.

My personal promise to every designer coming out of performance reviews is that I seek or create opportunities for the designer to practice new skills or behaviours highlighted in their growth plan.

Similar to craft roles, people roles can also level-up. As they grow in their career tracks, people managers usually manage larger teams, become accountable for team success rather than individual success, dedicate more of their time to setting best practices, align and coach the team on those practices, and become more involved in driving strategic direction for the design organization.

Getting deeper into competencies

The framework above provides a great 10,000-foot view of how roles can progress. But what about the day-to-day feedback, coaching, and mentoring that designers require and crave? What are the specific skills, behaviours, and competencies they need to practice and demonstrate?

We can break down a designer role into three areas of focus: Execution, Behaviours, and Strategy.

When I provide feedback to designers on these competencies, I also attach a mastery level:

• Emerging – Not demonstrating consistently, or hasn’t had the opportunity to demonstrate.

• Proficient – Demonstrates consistently

• Authority – Demonstrates consistently and teaches others

If you’d like to see how the entire framework comes together, take a look at Product Designer levels, and Product Manager levels. I created these during my time at Properly, and look forward to tweaking and applying these in the future.