Career Progression is like Dungeons & Dragons
Dear Designer,
I used to play Dungeons & Dragons. A game where you solve problems with other people and then you’re all awarded some experience points, XP, and when you’ve reached enough points you advance to the next level. You don’t necessarily get the same amount of points for solving a given task. The people who contribute more get more points.
This sounds a whole lot like working in a big company in the US, and I don’t know what came first. Dungeons & Dragons, or American corporate ladders with levels.
In Dungeons & Dragons you start out at level 1 and you solve some small problems. Maybe you kill some kobolds who are harassing some farmers. Later in the game you may be coordinating cities to send forth armies to root out the dragons that threaten the kingdom. In both examples you get rid of some monsters that are harassing some people, however, the kinds of skills required to persuade city governments, plan the battle, and lead armies are very different from when all you had to do was swing a sword and not get killed by some kobolds.
Now, as a total aside, I once made a campaign for two friends and to start things off I had them meet two kobolds and through unlucky dice rolls the kobolds killed them. Just to say that killing kobolds can be serious business.
Back to levels and corporate America.
First you need to learn how to work
Just like in Dungeons & Dragons the tasks that count change as you move up the levels. In the very beginning you get points for “how” more than “what”. Straight out of college you are spending weeks on work that more senior people can bang out in an afternoon. All anyone cares about at that point is that you learn how to be a part of a team. They look at how willing you are to take on work and then most crucially they look at how and when you ask for help. The key is that you try yourself yet not bang your head against the wall too long. Instead, you’re expected to ask for help and it’s better if you ask about the bigger picture instead of just many small one off questions. It typically takes about a year to learn how to work. Sometimes longer.
Next it matters ‘what’ you deliver
Once you’ve learned how to work, the next level is about “what” you deliver. You get bigger tasks and you’re starting to pull your own weight. At this point people look at the quality of your work. They look at whether you build on other people's work or just reinvent everything. They look at speed and completeness. Once you have this down, they look at “how” again. Are you figuring out how to help others, contribute as a team, and make the team’s output stronger? At this point you’re probably 3-6 years into your career. At some companies these 3-6 years is one title/level and at other companies you go through 2-4 titles/levels for these steps.
You’re Senior Now
At the next level, It’s already known that “what” you can do is great. You’re a great designer. Now people start looking at how much guidance you need or whether you can be let loose on the big and hard projects and still be successful and only ask for help when it makes sense. People also look at whether you’re changing your mindset. Will you change from thinking only of your own output to that of the team as a whole?
In the previous levels you might have talked about the design process, approval process, and agile. At this level however, you actually understand what you’re talking about. You aren’t just talking about how the process should be better. Rather, you’re improving the way your team works, often through many smaller steps.
You have probably also taken on mentoring other on your team. Perhaps just unofficially.
You may also quite possibly be the designated lead designer of a bigger project. And you plan work for others.
Most people reach this level after 5-8 years working. Some take longer. That’s ok. Some companies call this level Senior, some call it Lead, smaller companies call this level Principal. This is typically the first level where you can become a manager. Many people never make it past this level. That’s ok. You can retire at this level. People at this level are the most valuable at a company. They are the people who know pretty much everything there is to know about the work and who do most of the work.
Deliver through others
What does it take to get beyond Senior? Well, the company rewards impact, not the number of rectangles you draw. To have more impact, you need to find a way to come up with valuable initiatives, win people over to your idea, get funding and support from management, and execute the projects.
I once had a mentor who told me the following story to help me make this leap:
Many years earlier, my mentor got called into his boss office some Friday afternoon. My mentor was working for the CTO of the company and he was working hard. The CTO told my mentor that he needed to do more. My mentor panicked for a bit. Thought about it. He was already working long hours but he figured he could probably work a bit harder. Maybe an hour more a day, maybe some more time on the weekend. He started to rattle this off and the CTO stopped him. “No” he said, “I don’t need 10% more, I need you to deliver 10 times more”. That stopped my mentor dead in his tracks. He couldn’t possibly work 10 times more. He went home and started thinking over the weekend. And he began to change his focus from what he could deliver himself to what he could deliver with and through others.
Anders Hejlsberg, who invented C#, tells a similar tale.
He was working on a project and roughly keeping track with a competing project that had ten engineers. Then the other team added five more people and he couldn’t keep up any longer and realized it didn’t matter how good he was individually. He had to figure out how to deliver through other people.
It’s hard to figure out how to deliver through others. You need to learn new skills. And most of the skills you need are so called soft skills which ironically turn out to be really hard. It’s persuasion, influencing, strategy, relationship building, team building and so on.
The biggest mistake I see people make when trying to get to this level is focusing so much on driving new initiatives that they forget to do their day job. They forget that they are still at the previous level and expected to deliver great designs day in and day out. Chasing this next level can lead to losing focus.
As a manager, I’ve found it exceptionally hard to try to coach people to reach this level. It requires some sort of mental switch away from people themselves and onto thinking about what’s best for the group, company, product, and customers. And then the ability to do something about it. I’ve not found a way to reliably help people make the mental switch.
Some people can reach this level fast. It takes them maybe only 10 years from they graduate from college. Most of those people are on their way to become executives. More people get to this level 12-15 years into their careers, and some take 20-25 years to get here. Most never do. That’s ok.
Big companies call this level principal or architect or something along those lines.
Real Business Impact
There are two more levels. Only a handful of people reach these levels so I’ll keep it short. At the next level you’re probably a manager. I’ve never seen or heard about any individual contributor designer reaching that level in any company I’m familiar with. You probably run a team of 100-200 designers and your day to day is working with the executives of the company to turn strategy into product. At this level you’re expected to have significant business impact.
Level 20
The final level is executive. At this point you’re running a team of 200+ designers and in most ways the buck stops with you. When it comes to design there isn’t anyone above you. Your compensation package changes to an executive compensation package. Maybe your stock vests on a different schedule, your compensation is certainly more stock and bonus based, and quite possibly your bonus is tied to company initiatives. You’re no longer an employee. At this point, at least from compensation perspectives, you’re the company.
In Dungeons and Dragons terminology, you’ve reached level 20. Beyond here lies only epic levels. And to a large extend, you’re making the rules now.
Alternative image for this post. Via Ideogram. I kinda like this one too.
Thank you, Soo! I’ve been working on this one for a while and was a little hesitant about it. So thank you. This means a lot.
Love the metaphor! Really insightful way of explaining the design career journey Christian. I was nodding along to everything.