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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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