This will change how you think about UX Design career growth

I wanna talk about career growth and how that actually works at companies. So if you think about, if you think about the need for a UX designer at a company, it's because you want to develop or, you know, build an app or something of that nature, right? Maybe a website. You have something you need designed, so you hire a UX designer. Organizationally, figure out where that goes, but you hire a UX designer. To produce what you need to produce, right? We need a design for this app. Now, how long it takes to design that app, it varies based on designer. And the need for— after you, you kind of establish that, how long I guess a designer takes based on scoping, you may need more designers because you want to build more, right? And obviously the same thing scales for the development team as well. Same for PMs. If you want to design 3 features at a time, you're going to need a certain amount of people to design 3 features at a time, or 3 apps, or 1 app, right? It may take you a year to design and build an app, uh, or more, who knows, right? But that being said, did you notice how when you have 1 designer, it's going to take you X amount, and if you want to do more, you have to have 3? Designers. Well, as you progress into doing more at a time, well, you're gonna need someone to manage those designers. So that leaves opportunity for career growth for one of your designers or a new manager. And it also leads, um, you know, leaves role for, for growth overall. As that organization gets big, um, you're gonna need, uh, senior managers, directors. You might need more. It really depends on how many things you're trying to build at a certain time. And that creates a need for more people, which creates a need for more managers, which creates a need for other things too. There's also the individual contributor route where someone's really good at their job and you wanna retain that because there is a, when you get new, new, you know, when you need a new designer, you need someone new, there's onboarding, there's learning about the company. There's a lot that kind of goes into that that has a cost. So if you find someone that's good at your job, good at their job, you know, good producer, and you wanna. Keep them at the job and keep rewarding them and keep moving them up. There needs to be value in that too. And a lot of times it's because they, they don't have to be managed as much, or they don't need as much handholding or as guidance. So they're creating value, right? That allows that manager to watch other people and not have to focus so much on that person. That also shows mentorship and things like that. So as the teams grow and as people grow, there's individual contributor roles, there's management roles, and so on and so forth. That being said, you have to do certain things in order to build that, right? In order to get to that, your company needs to grow and your team needs to grow. So these are, these are things to consider from the company standpoint of how you would need, or why you would need, more growth or higher positions at a company. Usually like a startup, you may be a one-person design team and that's it. You're just designing one thing. But one thing I did wanna set here is the precedence for how much you can design or build or do at a certain time. If you try to be the hero, right, and you're working nights and weekends and things like that to crank out the design by the deadline, that might be good for the business once, But if you continue to do that, number one, you'll create burnout. You'll create, you know, unhappy employees and things like that. And especially too, if you're, if this is not your company, you're just like a person that's hired by the company and that can be a problem, right? Because now you have turnover with your, your designers and stuff like that. So you have to go through that onboarding and stuff like that, but it doesn't create, create the value for more need of other designers. For example, if you're a designer and you can design the whole app in one night, really, you know, that, that can be great, but what are you compromising in order to do that? Your personal time, research, quality of work. Um, you might not produce as high quality deliverables, so you spend more time working with developers. So there's certain areas that have to be there in order to produce a certain quality of work. And if you're, Trying, you know, if you want to maintain a certain quality, you need to make sure you account the time for those tasks. And that's kind of where you get into scoping your work properly. There are like, you know, if you look at development as a reference, right, they usually work in sprints and they have certain amount of times they try to deliver a certain piece in a sprint. The same thing can be a common work for design where you deliver X amount in that 2-week sprint. And you know, it's, it's accommodated. You say in 2 weeks, this is what I can deliver, you know, based on, on past. And you try to become more and more predictable, but then you have proper scoping of your work, what you can deliver. And it allows other people to see how much you can deliver over time that's predictable. And then you can say, oh, we, we're gonna need 2 designers. We're gonna need 3 designers because this is roughly how long it takes designers to develop this feature. Or I mean to design this feature or to, understand it. And then you have areas where you can overall improve your, your, you know, your production rate. You can scale, you can see growth, and you can start managing your time and having more predictable outcomes with your project management process. But you do need to know how long and try to figure out how long and how much someone can produce. And some of this methodology comes from like Scaled Agile Framework, where it tries to remove the the hero aspect of, of like the development process or the, you know, the design process. Because, you know, an example is when you have a hero, if that hero leaves, basically your company is just screwed. And you don't want that for your company. You want to be able to maintain, you want scalability. You don't want your company to last, you know, 2 years and die because someone left. You want it to be able to last with the times because you have good processes and systems in place that allow you to do that. So these are, these are areas where growth becomes natural for your design as you contribute and you do things and, and thrive and, you know, help foster that growth. Or just simply producing and producing high-quality deliverables and being rewarded for it. I think, and I think this is important, obviously every designer wants career growth. Every, you know, it helps the business, it helps retain employees, it helps foster more innovation and things like that. So, you know, this is just some thoughts around it. I mean, in my career, I've gone through different levels, different positions. I've had areas where I was the hero and I was cranking out crazy designs and I saved the company tons of money and then ended up not being rewarded and I ended up leaving. But I've also had other ones that were thankful for and appreciative of the level of effort. Where I did get like moved up or I got the promotions and that were not asking me to work nights and weekends in order to hit deadlines, right? They were asking me how long would I, would I give to, or how long is it gonna take me to do this work so that I can properly fulfill that? And if I finished early, we pull more stuff in. If I finish late, we move stuff back and then we try to be adjust, we try to adjust and become more predictable. So that's just my thoughts around the matter, especially from growing from the business perspective, right? And I think it's important to know that and understand why you need to, why you need that. So that you can understand why or how your career trajectory can go. Like if you're, if you're an individual designer and the overall term is to build a design team, well, The good news is you're the original designer. You're the one that has the input that helped and did that. And as it grows, obviously you'll continue to grow with that company. But if you go there and there's an established team that the company maturity doesn't really invest in UX, there's a lot of turnover, they're asking for nights and weekends, that might not be a good fit for you because they'd rather lose you and hire more than, and work you to the ground instead of, you know, trying to maintain that retention and trying to build internally. So let me know what you guys think. Let me know what you guys think. I think this is kind of an interesting topic overall. I've seen some companies do this really well. I've seen some companies do this terribly. So I feel like everyone's probably got some horror stories around it and probably some positive things as well. So let me know, but until next time, everyone, talk to you later.