Design promotions

Here’s a fun little factoid about my design career so far: I’ve never been promoted. I’ve always moved on to a different company to get a higher salary and change in title. I’ve never really stayed at once place long enough to warrant a promotion anyway (but was on the verge of getting promoted at least a couple of times). My design stints have all lasted somewhere around a year and a half each, and the longest I’ve stayed in one place was two years. This isn’t uncommon amongst my design peers, and the decision to move on to a different place is triggered by a combination of growth needs along with the desire to explore a new problem space once the existing one loses its novelty.

Perhaps unintentionally, the industry rewards job hopping. It’s far, far easier to just accept a job at a company that will give you the promotion, bump in salary, and change in title than it is to try and get it at the place you already work at. This is true across the entire tech industry. To get promoted internally, every company will tell you that you need to prove performance at the next level “for an extended period of time” (which can mean anywhere from six months to a year) in order to guarantee that you can keep up with the demands of the role. Meanwhile, other competing companies will hand out offers that meet your expectations for salary and responsibilities after a brief two-hour interview. Is it any surprise that designers job hop so often?

When you’re trying to go for a promotion at the company you’re working at, you also have a headwind working against you, which is the perception of your skillset to everyone above you. If you got hired from an internship, worked your butt off, got a full-time job offer, and are now trying to get a promotion a year or two later, every VP, Director, and Manager at the company has a firmly anchored perception of you as “the new inexperienced designer” no matter how much better you’ve gotten. They don’t believe that you’re ready for the next level yet. At the same time, they’re bringing people on to the design team with bigger titles and paychecks whose design output isn’t much better than your own. The dramatic improvement in your design skill over these few years greatly outweighs the improvement your perceived design skill from everyone above you. Hence, you move on to a company that actually will give you that shot.

After five or so years of working in small to medium sized startups in Boston going through this phase of job hopping to get “promoted”, it didn’t take long for me to realize that most of those companies don’t have a growth path for an IC designer beyond just the “Senior” or “Staff” designer title. They’re not able to promote you higher because they’re not sure what designers at that level even do. Most will push you into management, but I made it clear every time to my design managers that I’m not interested in management. I simply want to get better at my design craft and stay an IC designer, which seemed impossible at companies that size. This is one of the biggest reasons why I looked to Silicon Valley and started interviewing at places with mature design teams that allowed for that growth path I was seeking.

I was drawn to Lyft’s design team because it had an IC designer growth path and had a very strong design culture. I’ve now been here for over a year and have definitely found this to be true. There are a handful of designers at the Staff level and a few Principal Designers as well. One learning for me early on was that titles mean very different things at different org sizes. For instance, I had the Staff Product Designer title at my old job, but my role really wasn’t too different than what the designers without the Staff in their title were doing. It wasn’t entirely clear to me (or anyone at the company, if I’m being honest) what the difference in roles and responsibilities was between someone who was Staff and someone who was just Senior. It often boiled down to just the fact that Staff meant more years of experience as a designer.

At Lyft, Staff Designer means something very specific. It means that you’re responsible for driving design initiatives across entire lines of businesses. Lyft has several lines of business and many teams within those lines of businesses, which in turn are comprised of several smaller pods. There are over a hundred and fifty designers at Lyft, but only around twenty or so of them are at the Staff level or higher. Most of the time, designers are only focused on work within their pod and are primarily only working with a few other designers. Staff Designers are expected to drive collaboration across the entire design org as well as a drive strategic initiatives within their own line of business. They need to be able to identify opportunities with product partners, proactively work with UX Research, work on conceptual visions, and frequently meet with cross-functional leaders to drive the work forward. This is very different than what I was doing as a Staff Designer at my old company, where the design team was smaller than ten people.

Even though this distinction now exists in the company I work at and I have a clear sense of my growth path ahead, I’m left asking myself a question that I didn’t think I’d be asking myself — “Do I even want to get promoted to a Staff Designer?” This has been tough to come to grips with for me. Over the past year at Lyft, I’ve participated in the mentorship program, where I’ve been chatting with a designer who has been working at the Staff level for quite some time. The more I hear about the work I would be doing at the Staff level, the less it makes me want to do it. It’s a lot of putting together vision decks, calling meetings with cross-functional folks, communicating the tradeoffs of pursuing a specific approach, creating alignment between stakeholders, and pitching opportunities. All of this is still “design”, and this work is obviously extremely valuable. We need a lot more designers to think beyond the interface and work on this type of stuff, but is it what I myself want to do?

Like I mentioned earlier, my desire to grow as an IC comes from an innate motivation to get better at my design craft. And yes, one of the criteria for getting promoted to Staff does include better design craft in general, but once you get there, you’re naturally doing less of it. The problems at the interface layer matter far less than your instinct for product thinking. At this level, you’ve proven that you’re an excellent problem-solver in the visual context and are now tackling challenges at the product and organizational level. And there are tons of problems here. Problems with people, processes, methodologies, identifying risks, tackling opportunities, and pursuing new challenges. But again, do I really want to do any of that?

If it seems like I’m asking a lot of questions, it’s because at the end of the day, I’m left with a sense of uncertainty about whether or not the paths laid out in front of me are the ones I want to walk on. Sure, there are other organizations too who have IC paths, but they all follow a similar paradigm to what Lyft has. After reading through many of the interviews in Brian Lovin’s excellent Staff Design series, it’s become clear to me that most organizations will mold and cater the job responsibility of a “Staff Designer” to whatever their business needs are. Some will require their Staff Designers to work across the entire design org and standardize patterns, whereas others will ask you to influence design outside of the company and speak at conferences or events. Some just believe that a Staff Designer is someone who has a proven track record of shipping excellent products or features, while others treat it as a designer who has a mature sense of design thinking skills or abilities and is able to run design sprints or workshops with cross-functional partners effectively. Aside from one or two exceptions, it seems like most companies don’t see an excellence in design craft as the only metric of success in a Staff Designer.

Of course, I’m not arguing that craft should be the only thing designers at that level should be good at. They naturally need many of the other soft skills and complementary skills to get there. But craft is the pillar of design I inherently care the most about, and the one that comes most naturally to me as something to work on and continually improve upon. Everything else requires careful thought, prioritization, and a regular cadence to get better at. And it’s getting harder for me to justify getting promoted just for the sake of getting promoted if I’m not able to guarantee that I can keep working on my craft.

It’s interesting to note how much my perspective on design promotions has changed over the years. For many of the last few years, my thinking was that if I kept doing better design work, showcased the improvement, and kept getting promoted, I’d naturally get to work on bigger and better things where I could keep improving my craft. That’s only been partially true, because I’m now at a point where getting promoted means I have to solve different types of design problems and possibly ones that don’t necessarily excite me. All the organizational and process-driven problems I highlighted earlier are still important essential things to work on, and it’s all still “design”. But is it the type of design I see myself doing? Or do I take the path of specialization within craft?

Things that interest me within the craft ladder are motion design, high-fidelity rapid prototyping, and VR/AR. If I could specialize in one of these things, I could in theory carve my own IC path that doesn’t shoehorn me into funneling myself down an IC path that these companies have written out based on their organization’s structure, processes, and problems. The more I think about it, the more I’m coming to the conclusion that I might have a very unique IC designer path to look forward to in the future. It’s all very muddy and uncertain right now, but I plan to be very intentional and strategic about this going forward, so a lot more to come on this later!