Proven guide to a long career in design
Three frameworks to maximize your personal growth in every role.
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This week’s guest post is from Kevin Flores. Kevin has built and led product and design teams in every work environment: agency, freelance, startup, and mid-to-large companies, including Verizon, 23andMe, and LinkedIn. As co-author of the Design Career Handbook (Design Career Handbook), he's mentored countless designers and shared actionable strategies for career success.
His projects have been included in interface design books, and he has co-authored over twenty technology patents. He continues to serve as a consultant and coach in the design community.
In today’s post, you will gain:
Design Career Pathway Framework: This framework maps out the journey from entry-level to senior roles, helping you understand expectations and plan your career path effectively.
Continuous Learning and Adaptation Framework: Discover strategies to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving field by embracing new trends, tools, and technologies.
For more on Kevin, visit his personal website and his book’s website (highly recommended)!
Three frameworks to maximize your personal growth in every role
Designers who’ve had long careers often share that their journeys were non-linear. This should come as no surprise, given that the breadth of abilities and interests we accumulate can lead us down many different paths. I can sum up the key to my long, non-linear career in one word: reinvention. I’ve learned plenty from starting an agency, freelancing, co-founding a bootstrapped startup, and leading teams at large companies. Each experience provided new skills to build upon and apply in subsequent environments and roles.
In this post, I’ll share three tips from the Design Career Handbook (which I co-wrote with my partner, Jeanine Flores) and a few anecdotes to help you be flexible and agile—traits essential for navigating a long career.
It's time to get to work when you’ve accepted a new role or embarked on a new venture. You’ll be anxious and excited to dive right in. That’s cool! Be prepared to absorb as much as possible in your first few weeks. You’ll meet people and learn a lot of new information and processes. It will take you a little while to establish an effective routine.
Every job is different, depending on your design discipline, the size of the company or organization, the industry, and the team structure. However, there are common strategies to be successful in any workplace setting.
Let’s jump right into a few proactive things you should do.
Framework 1: Go Spelunking
If you’ve joined a company, you’ll learn plenty through training or informal meetings with your manager, an onboarding buddy, or new colleagues. Don’t be afraid to ask, “What else is important for me to know?” Asking plenty of questions demonstrates your eagerness to learn—the oft-referred-to growth mindset. Everyone expects questions. A new teammate is exciting for the team dynamic, as topics you initiate with curiosity stimulate discussion.
Particularly at established organizations, you’ll get access to resources and project libraries where you’ll find a wealth of references. Ask your onboarding buddy or a new colleague what would be helpful for you to review and which are a priority. Be a sleuth. Don’t be shy about poking around information that you have access to. You’ll pick up valuable tips and likely answer some of your own questions. Reviewing past documents and files should reveal many insights about existing processes, designers, and cross-functional partners. I refer to this as spelunking.
This is precisely what I did when I joined 23andMe during its rise to peak popularity. Although I was hired to build and lead the product design team, this tip is helpful for any stage of one’s career. 23andMe, like many companies, had servers full of documentation from product development specifications and past releases, analytics from A/B and multivariate tests, marketing plans, customer research, and design files.
By poring over this information and data treasure trove, I quickly absorbed the marketing landscape and details about our customers, products, teams, and internal processes. I identified the power players in the company and scheduled meetings with them. And, importantly, I could immediately ask detailed questions in strategy and roadmap sessions. I demonstrated value by actively engaging as a cross-functional collaborator soon after I was hired. All of this aided in rapidly developing my point of view in an industry that was entirely new for me. This is an effective way to establish yourself early in a new environment.
Framework 2: Find Your Partner in Crime
Building strong relationships will immensely benefit your job and career. Being visible and communicative will lead to invitations and opportunities. Connecting with others on a human level builds trust and creates the space for direct and honest feedback and the ability to work through conflicts faster. Depending on where you consider yourself on the introvert-to-extrovert spectrum, this topic can be terrifying or exhilarating. In either case, building productive relationships takes time, so don’t feel rushed. You will establish good rapport via daily interaction with teammates. You’ll forge deeper bonds through one-on-one meetings with your manager, peers, and cross-functional partners.
All of that is good, but there are particularly valuable partnerships you should establish. I call them partners in crime. I’m talking about that other designer, or even better, that art director, product/project manager, or engineer you gel with and who just gets you. You admire each other’s responsibilities and actively collaborate to ensure mutual success. Your partner in crime wants to experiment together, geek out on side projects with you, and co-lead initiatives where you can jointly make a difference.
By working with a partner in crime, you’ll undoubtedly pick up additional skills, generate excellent anecdotes for your portfolio, and build your experience in perseverance and tenacity.
But how do you know who’d be an ideal partner in crime? Discover them using your core design skill of empathy. Look out for what makes your co-workers tick and what makes them stand out. Look for areas where you can help others advance from good to great.
Remember that partnerships are mutually beneficial.
By now, you’re getting a sense of what you’re good at, a.k.a. your superpowers. And you’ll start recognizing what other people are good at, too. The magic happens when partners in crime have complementary skills or traits.
Here are a few examples:
As a creative visual designer, you provide value by finding inspiration in everything and generating many concepts, even when “analysis paralysis” sets in for a team. A brilliant technical partner can increase your success rate by highlighting feasibility assessments when it’s time to converge on a solution.