The IC Designer career ladder

The primary reason for me wanting to join a larger tech company like Lyft is because they had defined career ladders for IC (Individual Contributor) Designers who didn’t want to go into management. Back in Boston, I was floating around from small startup to medium sized startup, all of whom had small-ish design teams and I quickly found myself as the senior-most designer being asked to manage the junior designers. I made it very clear that I wanted to stay an IC Designer, to which the Head of Design and VP of Product would mention that they’re not entirely sure how I could continue to grow as an IC Designer. The business need at the time was to manage the rapidly growing design team, not scale the career ladder to senior IC designers.

Lyft has defined tracks for IC Designers up to the high Staff and Principal levels. I found this really appealing, and there were designers at these levels at the company who I could look up to. I could point to a Mark or a Jenny who was at these levels and say “Yes, I’d like to be where this person is at a couple of years from now.” This wasn’t possible at the small startups. There are no role models if you’re the senior-most designer and want to continue down the IC path. I didn’t want to be a design manager and certainly didn’t want to work my way up to the Head of Design. I wanted to continue pushing pixels and elevating the bar for design quality by honing in on my craft.

I’ve now been at Lyft for two years, and I’m going up for a promotion to the Staff Designer level. This was actually my title at my past company, but to be honest, I think I was just given that title without a clear definition of what it would mean for my roles and responsibilities. At Lyft, a “Staff Designer” means very specific things. It means that you should be able to work across the entire design team to lead important initiatives and projects; in a company where the design team is over a hundred and fifty people, it can be quite the challenge to do this well. It means that you should be able to influence cross-functional partners and leaders in the organization to pursue higher-value opportunities and pivot roadmaps as needed; this is also quite tricky, since there’s a lot of disciplines you interact with and need to slowly form relationships over time to even have a shot at doing this well.

I’m not entirely sure if this promotion will go through or not. To be honest, I have a lot of mixed feelings about the whole thing. My goal is to grow my craft and focus more on the actual design work. I want to refine my motion design, animation, prototyping, and visual design skills. I want to keep pushing the craft to higher levels and go deeper into it. However, the structure of career ladders at Lyft (and pretty much any other large tech company) don’t afford you the opportunity to solely be good at craft. You’re required to be influence leadership, you’re responsible for facilitating large workshops, you’re asked to present vision decks to VPs and Directors, you’re asked to promote and contribute to the culture of the design team, mentor junior designers, give talks at conferences, write blog posts, assist in interviewing and recruiting, participate in planning, and so much more. It can be a little overwhelming for someone who doesn’t really love all those things and just wants to keep designing (like me). It almost feels like all those other things are a distraction getting in the way of me improving my actual design work.

So that’s the big mental roadblock. Do I want all of these additional responsibility and tasks? Or should I just stay at my current level where I’m not expected to do all of that and just have more time to continue honing my craft? And if the latter is the correct answer, can I ever actually get promoted to the next level anywhere by avoiding the other things that I’m expected to do as an IC Designer? What’s the point of even staying at this company if the thing I came here to do — grow my craft as an IC Designer — isn’t afforded to me in the way that I’d like to do it? It’s a weird thing to grapple with.

I also see a lot of messages from recruiters who seem to promise exactly what I’m looking for elsewhere. I tell them I want to stay as an IC Designer and keep refining my craft, and they say they have the perfect role for me. Then I talk to the hiring manager / design manager for the role and ask to see the IC career ladders at the company. And sure enough, it looks pretty similar to what Lyft has. They also want you to coach, present, facilitate, influence, lead, own, etc. And it yet again seems like I’d be overloaded by all those additional tasks and burnout quickly instead of getting to do what I want to do — design. I’m by no means dismissing or diminishing the value of those things. I understand that it’s important for the company and valuable for junior designers to benefit from. I could be that “role model” that the younger designers look up to and aspire to be, but I don’t want it to be at the expense of my desired personal growth and don’t want to stray from my values.

The way Lyft’s promo cycle works is that they expect you to be operating at the next level for six months or a year before you’re officially promoted. So technically, I’ve already been doing a lot of the tasks that are expected of me at the next level. And I’m actually able to do them relatively well. But here’s the thing — none of it comes naturally to me. I always feel like I’m manufacturing some superficial energy to push through all of it. Being introverted by nature, I’m most comfortable when I’m left to my own devices and asked to come up with several solutions to a particularly challenging design problem. When you ask me to lead a cross-functional workshop to brainstorm solutions, sure I’ll do it. But it’ll take me a lot of time to put together the materials, rehearse what I’ll be saying, put together an agenda, figure how to to proactively communicate and collaborate with stakeholders, etc. All of this takes a ton of mental effort and energy. I know a lot of designers who are naturally great storytellers and leaders; they have the personality and energy to pull off stuff like this and they’re great at it. I’d just rather be the person who takes the outputs of all these activities and uses them to brainstorm solutions independently after the fact. I don’t want the spotlight, just hand off things to me in the backstage and let me do my thing.

And sure, you might say that it only feels difficult now because I’m new to it. It’ll get easier over time. Any new thing takes time to get better at. Two things in response to that. Firstly, you have to actually want to get better at those things. If you don’t have the intrinsic motivation to truly want to be good at it, it’ll just feel like an additional chore you have to do for work. Secondly, there are personalities that are naturally better suited for this than others. I’ve always been introverted and any kind of socialization has consistently drained my energy. There are IC Designers who find it energizing and enriching to do this kind of influential cross-team workshop-leading talk-giving presentations on stage, and others who absolutely despise it.

So what’s the solution, at the end of the day? Is it even possible to continue down the craft path as you get more senior? My suggestion to organizations is to allow “focus areas” within the IC track as you proceed down the career ladder instead of a generic path for all IC designers. Let some designers focus on presentations, talks, workshops, and influence while letting others focus on pushing new visual components, overhauling the information architecture of the product, adding micro-interactions, incorporating new input methods, and experimenting with new hardware. These are two separate skillsets performed by two different roles, both of whom get to have the Staff or Principal Designer title. One works internally to transform the team’s design culture whereas the other works externally to elevate the company’s design quality across their entire product suite. There might even be a third focus area for those who are really into the organization’s macro-ergonomic design, diving deep into how reporting structures and cross-pod collaboration works. Lots of opportunity here.

I think we’re still pretty young as a discipline to see widespread adoption of this proposal anytime soon. Many senior designers just end up going into management simply because they need the financial boost in salary at that point in their lives or switching out of the IC Designer track entirely and either going freelance or into the agency world to focus on craft more. There was a brief period of time where companies like Google or Adobe offered roles like “Principal Interaction Designer” where you could solely focus on curating specific micro-interactions, but those seem all but gone now. The lean nature of tech funding and the generalization of roles has forced organizations to push more and more onto IC Designers, and I don’t think it’s in a healthy spot right now due to how many are quickly burning out or jumping ship to go elsewhere only to encounter the same problems there. In the meantime, I’ll be trying to avoid dealing with the politics of this and instead try to actually just focus on what I want to get better at — design craft.