309: Career Progression for Product Designers

This week, we look at how a product designer's career advances. We discuss the common themes and growth areas that companies use to measure progression, suggest questions you can ask yourself to assess your progress, read through some of your replies on the subject, and offer up several resources for diving deeper and learning more. And as always, we share a couple cool things, like a typeface designed for UI and an app to budget your money.

Follow-up:

🎉 It's Marshall's one-year podiversary 🎉
Brian built a Figma plugin to fetch data

Sketch Data
Google Sheets Sync
Rasmus Andersson was of great help :)

Industry Talk:

Themes:

Difficulty: Complexity, autonomy, scope, and constraints
Impact: Project success, sentiment, brand, process
Leadership: Mentorship, identifying opportunities and pitfalls, communication skills, maintaining quality, diversity and inclusion
Community: Nonreciprocal contributions, elevating culture, hiring

Questions to ask yourself regarding these themes:

Am I making change for myself, my team, my product, my organization, my company, or the industry as a whole?
Am I being reactive or proactive?
Am I seeking or being sought?

Brian asked what you thought on Twitter, and you responded!

Gabe Valdivia heard an apt metaphor regarding career roles and the human body
Jessica Harllee shares our thoughts on seniority and range of influence
Eric Windmill expects seniority to be accompanied by humility
Kristy Tillman shared an article and noted the use of "mature"
Maxim pointed us to some of his past tweets on the subject

Resources:

Buzzfeed: Product Design Roles
Basecamp: Titles for Designers
Dear Ueno: What’s the difference between a designer, a senior designer, a design lead and a creative director?
On Being a Senior Engineer
GitLab: Product Designer
Progression.fyi
Career Architectures for Design Teams

What do you think? Let us know!

One Cool Thing:

Brian shared an article about the Inter typeface by Rasmus Andersson
Marshall shared Copilot, a delightful app that "shows you where your money is going and helps you stay on budget" by Andrés Ugarte

Design Details on the Web:

We are @designdetailsfm

Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]
Marshall is @marshallbock
@Sarahberus and @Luperdev make us sound smarter than we are

Join the conversation on Spectrum or leave us a review on iTunes

BYEEEEE!