Hiring designers

You should read Career growth to understand how I hire for different roles by better understanding technical design skills.

Years experience and degree, historically aren’t good indicators for excellence, so I don’t focus on that.

For me, it is more important to work with people are passionate about the work, think in systems & want to learn

Head of Design

Experience: 15 - 20 years

Portfolio: Digital footprint for entire business

Channel responsibility: All

Technical design skills: Expert in 1, strong 2, capable in 2

Professional skills: Refine

Leadership: Vision

Leads the experience design vision for an entire business, in-country business or large business unit. Involves multi-channel and the entire experience across all functional areas. Responsible for ensuring high quality design in all technical design areas. Specifically, that all relevant tasks can be completed, that the system is usable, accessible and customers are happy with the design quality.

Related roles: In mature organisation it’s C-suite role and on the same level as the CTO, Head of Product, Head of Marketing etc. This is a managerial and leadership role.

Practice lead

Experience: 10 - 15 years

Portfolio: Area expertise for entire business

Channel responsibility: All

Technical design skills: Expert in 1, strong 2, capable in 2

Soft skills: Refine

Leadership: Planning & mentorship

Experts in the different functional areas of design, how things look, how things sound and how things work. They are responsible for the quality of their area, process, standards and quality of execution.

The head of design leans heavily on these roles to ensure the entire team follow due process. There are four flavours, UX, UI, Research and writing practice leads.

This can be a managerial role and is a leadership role.

Design lead

Experience: 5 - 10 years

Portfolio: Digital footprint in an area (e.g. Growth)

Channel responsibility: All

Technical design skills: Expert in 1, strong 2, capable in 2

Soft skills: Communication & presentation

Leadership: Fundamentals

Responsible for the experience in a particular functional area. In cross-functional teams the Design lead is assigned to a team, just like the product manager and technical lead. 

They are responsible for the quality of work the team is responsible for. They are accountable for the quality of design delivery in that team.

This is a leadership and managerial role.

 A designer is not a design lead, if they do not have people reporting to them.

Expert

Experience: 5 - 20 years

Portfolio: Digital footprint in an area (e.g. Growth OR CHEF OR Logtail)

Channel responsibility: All

Technical design skills: Expert in 1, strong 2, capable in 2

Soft skills: Stakeholder management & process

Experienced and well versed designer who prefers doing the work over managing people. Expert in different functional areas, such as UI, Writing, Interaction design, Information architecture, Service design, Research or Prototyping.

In rare circumstances and large teams, they are specialised in one technical design skill.

Modern experience design teams require team members to be highly skilled in at least 3 areas.

Portfolio: can design an entire system, e.g. IOS app or entire area. Growth.

Solid contributor

Experience: 2 - 5 years

Portfolio: Digital footprint in an area (e.g. Growth, CHEF, Logtail)

Channel responsibility: All

Technical design skills: Expert in 1, strong 2, capable in 2

Soft skills: Communication & presentation

Individual contributor

Mid-level designer who’s still figuring out what direction they want to take in their career. They are accountable for the quality of their own design delivery. They are very capable in one area, e.g. UI design, but are also able to do production ready research, interaction design.

It generally takes 2 - 4 years of study and at least 2 years of professional work to be at the lowest performance level of 3. An individual can stay in this category indefinitely when they work in business who do not offer other career paths for designers

Portfolio: Should be able to design across a functional area. For instance Growth or Chef.

For instance, in Payments they will design the entire checkout flow, all the the profile work as well as understand

This is an individual contributor role.

Junior

Experience: 0 - 2 years

Portfolio: Digital footprint in functional area (e.g. Sign up/in)

Channel responsibility: All (with a lot of support)

Technical design skills: Strong in 1, capable in 2

Soft skills: Professional

Individual contributor

Generally they studied a degree related to one of the technical design skills.

 They must be able to do high-quality work in their area of expertise.  It usually takes 2 -4 years of studying in a field related to one of the technical design skills and up to 2 years in the workplace.

 They are accountable for the quality of their own delivery work. They should be able to design an entire section of the work. For instance, doing Sign up, sign in, lost password, edit account details and deleting profile across multiple channels.

This is an individual contributor role.

Intern

Experience: 0 - 1 year

Portfolio: Flow

Channel responsibility: All (with a lot of support)

Technical design skills: Education or self taught in 1

Soft skills: Professional

Individual contributor

Generally they studied a degree related to one of the technical design skills.

 They must be able to do high-quality work in their area of expertise.  It usually takes 2 -4 years of studying in a field related to one of the technical design skills and up to 2 years in the workplace.

They are accountable for the quality of their own delivery work.

They should be able to design an entire section of the work. For instance, doing Sign up, sign in, lost password, edit account details and deleting profile across multiple channels.

This is an individual contributor role.

The years of experience in this article is a good guideline, but look at actual capability as part of technical experience.

Thumbnail icon by DinosoftLab from the Noun Project