Design Details

309: Career Progression for Product Designers

Episode Summary

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.

Episode Notes

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:

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  • Marshall is @marshallbock
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• Join the conversation on Spectrum or leave us a review on iTunes

BYEEEEE!