Role models in design

Here’s a topic I haven’t seen discussed much. When you’re starting off as a junior or associate designer in the industry, you’ve got tons to learn. You’ve just got your foot in the door and are eager to learn anything from anyone. You look up to certain designers at your company and want to be like them. You take note of what they’re doing, how they think, how they work, and try to mimic them in hopes of one day getting to where they are.

And years later, maybe you do get there. Or maybe you carve your own path and become your own version of that ideal in your mind. And then…what? The role models suddenly start to disappear and you’re left wondering who else to aspire to become. If you don’t have a clear cut sense of what you want to do and where you want to go, it can be paralyzing to be in this place. You’re just wandering the desert in search of some nomad who’ll show you how to properly ride a camel through the scorching sands.

This is especially true in tech. Once you hit five or seven years of experience in the industry working as a designer leveling your way up to Senior Designer and Staff Designer, there just aren’t that many people to look up to anymore. The management path is chosen far more often than the individual contributor (IC) one, so experienced designers end up becoming design managers. Senior designers who want to someday become managers have role models here, but what about the ones who want to stay as ICs? It’s just much tougher for them to carve out their own career path.

That’s not to say there aren’t any successful ICs out there. Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, and a lot of big tech companies have prominent designers in IC roles at the Principal or Fellow level, and they contribute greatly to keeping their design organization running. But they’re few and far between. Startups typically don’t mature or stay in business long enough to grow their designers into the uppermost IC roles. And because they run so lean, they’d much rather hire a designer who can manage the younger designers than one who only wants to do design. It’s really unfortunate.

I myself am struggling with this right now. I know I don’t particularly want to go down the management route. I know I enjoy doing specific aspects of design like prototyping and creating high-fidelity interactions. I’d love a role where I’m some kind of specialized technical prototyper, where other designers hand me their mockups and ask me to animate a flow for either user testing purposes or to showcase the motion design intent when handing it off to engineers. I’d love a role like that. But I don’t know anyone who does this. I may have come across a couple on Twitter, but they’re so rare to find that it’s nearly impossible to plan a path here.

It all seems to happen so fast. Some seven years ago, I was gleeful and joyous that I had convinced people to hire me on as a designer. I struggled through imposer syndrome and eventually got confident enough in my own work. I carved out a niche for myself as someone who enjoys interaction design and is also really into UI design for games. And now I want to keep specializing further down that path, but I find myself without any role models to reference here. In a way, it’s exciting because I get to forge my own way forward, but I can’t help but think that it’d be ten times easier if I knew someone who had tried or done similar things.

The tech world as a whole is still young. The explosion of mobile and the sudden need for designers only became a big deal last decade. Now, those designers are evolving and maturing into senior roles and are looking to take their careers to the next level. How will the industry deal with the large numbers of designers wanting to become ICs and not manage their younger designers? How will the expectations and roles for designers start changing and straying from the way things have been so far? It’s 2020, and things are about to shake up a bit. I’m interested to see where it goes, both because I’m personally invested in figuring out my own career trajectory here and am professionally curious to see what my peers end up doing.