One of the common themes I’ve found throughout the clients we’ve worked with at ZeroToDesign is the differences in expectations of their Designers. Most don’t demand/expect the same from their Design team as their counterparts across the pond, because Europe is a more immature Product market vs. the US.
UX OGs, the NN group wrote the levels of UX maturity in companies in 2021. They introduced the concept to distinguish the ways in which companies approach their UX internally, some being better than others. Read about their piece on Maturity Levels for UX below👇🏼
How this translates inside a team that works on a Product is that the lower (left) you are, the less is going to be expected/demanded of you as a Designer. Mainly because it’s not understood very well and most likely seen as a visual output — e.g Hey can you just design this button for us?
What the company/product team expects of you as a Designer is one side of the coin. On the other side, you might be thinking, what do I want to achieve as a Designer.
If all you ever want to do is deliver artboards of designs on Figma, then this article isn’t for you. There is no moral obligation to deliver beyond what may be required of you. But if you want to strive for more in Product, Design, and user-driven technology, then read on.
This article is going to cover the types of ways Designers can deliver & work. It will help you understand what level you’re at and why the situation you’re in exists. It references Product Managers (PMs) heavily as ultimately they are in charge of the roadmap, and most of the Designers' face-time in a Product team is with the PM.
I’ll use time estimates to determine how long it took me to reach each level, and what milestones I hit (including mental) along the way. The timing here doesn’t take into account the hard skill ability to actually design (e.g. on Figma), and instead is focused on the time to hone the soft skill.
Let’s go.
Level 1 — Entry Level Designer
Ability: Deliver to satisfy
Minimum time required: None
This one is pretty simple. You get the job done, well done. Hopefully what you needed to design was clearly laid out and what you created looks and feels nice!
This requires no additional time to hone because there is no soft skill involved, you just get the job done that’s asked of you, whether is the optimal solution for the user or not.
An important note before proceeding to the remaining levels. There are two key reasons why it’s important for Product Designers to go beyond just delivering the features that are asked of them:
- The goal of Product Managers isn’t to understand users to the same depth as Designers do, and so as the champion for the customer, Designers need to raise things that PMs simply don’t have the time to get stuck into.
- Product Managers balance desirability (mainly Designers' involvement), feasibility, and viability to determine what the solution should be for the Product, then ultimately the business and its customers. Due to this balancing act, Designers need to push hard for desirable experiences, otherwise, that 1/3 gets swallowed up by the other 2/3.
Level 2 — Insightful Designer
Ability: Deliver and highlight
Minimum time required: 3–6 months
After you’re done just getting the job done, your curious animal brain might start thinking of some other ways to complete your design tasks.
This is where highlighting comes in. You may work on a feature and realize that something could be better and raise that with your stakeholders in Design critiques or during the discovery process.
But that’s likely as far as you’ll take it. Ultimately you’re still early in your career and are getting an understanding of the types of solutions you can design for. Here you’ll perhaps present a problem that you’re facing, but continue on with a less-than-ideal solution because you’re facing time constraints or the stakeholder/PM is quite senior.
It’s a natural evolution, one that takes time, but the key thing to remember here is that you do want to be thinking of other ways to solve the problem. As you proceed up the levels, you will combine this with other soft skills to help you eventually not just think about other ways, but convince stakeholders that the other way is a better solution.
Level 3 — Questioning Designer
Ability: Deliver but question
Minimum time required: 12–18 months
This one requires a big mental shift. You’re now going from getting the work done + raising some alternatives, to trying to understand why we’re even doing the work in the first place. This requires a mixture of bravery and nuance. The bravery comes from practice, and the nuance comes from a good understanding of the overall Product (Product Thinking).
You don’t want to go gung-ho and say why the f*ck are we doing this, this is stupid… (which is exactly what I used to do) because that’s an awful way to communicate to your decision-making stakeholders. You want to question in a way that evokes curiosity from your side, not defensiveness from their side.
A questioning Designer will not only ask the why behind the features that are being built, but try and bring in links with other future features, with existing functionality, and with business goals. This will make your ‘why’ more powerful.
Essentially it's the start of creating a collaborative dynamic with your PM and building your Product Thinking ability. PMs are responsible for many things and have a challenging stakeholder-focused role, so as PDs, we can assist & challenge them before we start building.
In this stage, you will start to set a standard for when new features are being thought about and prioritized, and enable your PMs to actually bring the why more often to your kick-off calls or their thought process in general. They might start to bring more open-ended requirements for you to explore, or discuss alternative solutions that might be on the table.
It’s a beautiful evolution to witness.
Level 4 — Designer + Salesperson
Ability: Delay solutionizing, understand & offer alternatives
Minimum time required: 4 years
Here you start to take more ownership of the User Experience as a Designer.
This is where a deep level of Product Thinking & Business Understanding comes into play. As I mentioned in the note before starting Level 2, PMs are balancing a few factors when developing features. As a Designer, not being aware of those factors is a naive move, one that will continually bite you in the 🍑. The more you understand what other elements go into the building of a Product, the better informed you are when creating solutions or offering alternatives.
Having experience working on different products and experiences helps, as you’re able to recall alternatives/standards easily/faster, and have the confidence to push back quickly (via slack/inside a call). Both require time, and iterations (mistakes), which you should try and make when you’re still inside the earlier levels.
The reason that it’s important to be able to do this quickly, is because calls/meetings are typically situations when key decisions get made. Stakeholders will be looking to you to highlight things and raise them when everyone is present, so you ideally don’t want to be making them wait.
This is a System 1 ability (Thinking Fast & Slow reference), but it can/should also be done through your System 2. You can send a Slack message or email after a call and explain your thoughts in detail and offer an alternative solution. You’ll then likely need to jump on a (shorter) call to confirm whatever has been raised & pivot accordingly.
This level of delivery will require you to become a better Salesperson. The ability to deliver designs is a staple for us, but due to reasons such as low UX maturity or lack of customer understanding, you as a Designer are well-positioned to raise and champion a problem or alternative solution. When you do this, you will need to not only articulate your points clearly but inspire & convince other stakeholders that the thing you are articulating is a more appropriate solution.
This requires a few skills to build & refine:
- Sales style — your style of convincing other people and bringing them to your solution as the one they need will be honed over many attempts at ‘selling’.
- Bravery — you’ll want to push back and raise points in uncomfortable environments. This requires bravery, which will be honed over time, and/or is something you may have a natural knack for. I certainly did, but even that had to be refined over time to ensure I delivered in a way that didn’t bring out defensiveness from others.
- Product thinking — being able to understand the business goals & the user need in unison will improve your Product thinking. It will help you raise points that are balanced and will be understood & championed by other stakeholders too. Speak their language so that you can be understood better.
- Fundamental flow interpretation — to be able to recognize what the core journey is the user will go on, and stripping out the ‘feature’ or UI components from it will help you in driving the correct solution with less complexity. Reducing complexity is an underrated way to get alignment. Less moving parts = fewer decisions to be made.
- Rapid Visualisation — Sharing your screen to scribble out what is being discussed, or what the flow is starting to look like are some good ways to enable others to understand what you’re understanding. Often times this is the most powerful way to make it obvious that something is missing or needs to be reconsidered.
Drop a comment if you want to learn about how to build & refine these skills in more detail.
Closing
None of this is to say you should wait to jump levels. I didn’t. At no point in my career did I think I was limited to what I could achieve as a Designer and it served me well… eventually.
I went through the mistakes I needed. I learned lessons in articulating poorly, being emotional with my designs, questioning in an aggressive manner, and many other things. These are the natural stray bullets that occur when you’re growing and learning.
So keep pushing and believe in your ability to find the best solutions for your Product!
To growth without boundaries,
Sakky B
Co-founder, ZeroToDesign
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