How to operate as a Staff Product Designer
Q&A with Milan Jovanović, Mo Elmelegy and Rachel Wu.
Job title inflation in design is rife. There are many people with titles and claims to be operating at levels which they just are not. This happens when companies don’t know how to hire, attract and retain talent. This results in designers getting out of their depth, levelling gets diluted, and design ends up underutilised in the organisation.
The most common inflation I see is around the Senior, Staff and Principal titles.
They can mean different things in different companies.
I wanted to go deeper on this, specifically on Staff, a level that’s often misunderstood by the people being hired into it and the people doing the hiring so I have collaborated with 3 designers I respect immensely, Milan Jovanović, Mo Elmelegy and Rachel Wu.
Milan is a Product Designer at VEED, shaping cutting-edge tools that help folks go from idea to video in the blink of AI
Mo is a principal-level designer, currently at Bolt, with 17+ years across consumer mobile, e-commerce, and enterprise SaaS, working at the intersection of design and engineering.
Rachel is a Lead Product Designer at Mews, shaping product direction and experience strategy.
TL;DR:
Senior designers ship great features. Staff designers help the product make sense as a whole. The real difference isn’t seniority — it’s the scope and type of impact.
At the senior level, you’re asking, “How do we build this well?” At Staff, you’re asking, “Should we be building this at all, and if so, why?” It’s not about doing more of the same thing better. It’s about doing a fundamentally different kind of thing.
Designers who eventually become Staff rarely wait for the title. They start operating that way before the promotion happens. The shift isn’t about doing more — it’s about learning to think and act in multipliers.
Let’s get into it.
Q1: What is a Staff Product Designer?
Milan: There are many ways to be a Staff Product Designer.
For me, it’s someone who drives alignment and decision-making with explosive force, teaches design to non-designers in the process, and is a delightful partner to work with.
In essence, your work evolves from how things are executed to what needs to be executed and why.
I find myself designing conversions and meetings as much as layouts, buttons, and shadows. My work grew to shaping strategy across the product, not just shipping experiences within one part of it. But most of the time I feel like a counsellor — listening to and helping people be less sensitive to uncertainty, and less afraid of making a mistake. Not just with folks in my team, but with a large chunk of the product org. From Chief Product Officers to PMs to mid-level engineers.
Just because we can now build anything with AI doesn’t mean we should build everything that comes to mind. Staff designers need to be the voice that discerns higher-quality ideas and convinces other people they’re the right ones.
Mo: Titles in design are messy. Different companies use them differently, and expectations are often unclear. Over the past few years, I’ve operated across Staff and Principal scopes in different environments. One thing I’ve learned is that the real difference between these levels isn’t seniority — it’s the scope and type of impact.
Here’s the simplest way I’ve learned to think about it:
Senior
Scope: A feature, flow, or product area
Primary impact: Shipping strong work and raising the quality inside the team Staff
Principal
Scope: Domain or company level, Influencing long-term direction and product systems
Primary impact: Multiple teams or product areas, creating structure and alignment across the product
Every company draws the lines slightly differently, but the progression generally moves from owning problems to connecting problems to shaping how the product evolves.
Q2: How do you grow into a Staff role?
Milan: First, decide if this is something you even want.
If you love being told what to do, Staff is not for you. Senior is a very respectable level and you shouldn’t force yourself to be someone you’re not. I knew I was too stubborn to be told what to do, so here we are.
The fastest way to become Staff is also the hardest: join a small sub-20 person startup as the only designer. It’s trial by fire. You will burn out, probably, but you’ll quickly learn what to do when there’s no one telling you what to do.
If your company has the role, start small and build momentum:
Open up your design process, share it widely in Slack, bring developers into the conversation async. Explain your thinking out loud.
Hunt around the company for pain points. See if someone needs help or if there’s a vacuum of space.
Notice what the company goals are, then come up with ideas that span more than just your section. Draft quick mockups, vibe-code something with Cursor — but always connect your thinking to business outcomes.
Learn the words PMs and Growth teams use. Speak their language.
Set up calls with people in other teams. Ask what’s top of mind, then shut up and listen.
Know when you’re being annoying and calibrate accordingly. Misplaced, well-intentioned generosity can be very annoying.
Immediately stop complaining. To complain is to admit you’ve relinquished control. Your job is to keep a steady hand and lead people through uncertainty. To quote Satya Nadella, our job is to manufacture success with the resources we’re given.
Hype up fellow designers. You’re a champion of the design function — connect other designers’ work into your own.
Go to therapy.
Start there.
Mo: Designers who eventually become Staff or Principal rarely wait for the title. They start operating that way before the promotion happens.
A few patterns I’ve noticed in how strong Staff designers grow into the role:
They become the go-to person for a domain. It might be growth mechanics, onboarding, marketplace dynamics, design systems, or mobile architecture. This rarely happens through a formal assignment — it happens when someone spends enough time thinking deeply about a problem space that others start pulling them in whenever related questions arise.
They create initiatives nobody asked for. Staff designers don’t wait for the roadmap to define the work. They notice structural problems early — three teams solving the same problem differently, fragmented onboarding flows, inconsistent mechanics across features — and step in anyway. They map the current state, propose a clearer structure, and bring the right people together.
They do the work to get the work done. Great designers don’t stop at producing a solution. That might mean clarifying the problem when it’s still vague, helping align teams around a direction, building prototypes to make ideas tangible, or pushing through ambiguity to move things forward. A lot of senior growth comes from this: not just designing the work, but making sure the work actually happens.
Q3: How do you think about Senior, Staff, and Principal day-to-day?
Milan: Senior is where you master execution within a defined space. Staff is where you start questioning the space itself — and expanding it.
The thing most people miss is that it’s not about doing more of the same thing better. It’s about doing a fundamentally different kind of thing. I spend as much time on conversations and alignment as I do on screens. That’s not a compromise — that’s the job.
Mo: Senior designers typically operate within a single team and own a meaningful part of the product. Their job is to turn messy product problems into clear, well-crafted solutions that ship. A strong senior designer drives a product area end-to-end, partners closely with product and engineering, and ships thoughtful, polished work.
When designers move into Staff roles, the scope expands beyond a single feature or team. The questions change:
Are different teams solving the same problem in different ways?
Is there a system behind these features, or are they drifting apart?
Where is the product becoming fragmented as it grows?
The strongest Staff designers I’ve worked with gravitate toward this kind of work — defining patterns other teams can reuse, connecting teams working on related challenges, bringing clarity to areas where the product is drifting.
Principal designers operate at an even broader level, partnering closely with senior leadership. The focus shifts from specific projects to where the product is heading over time.
Q4: What does operating at Staff level actually look like?
Milan: I design conversations and meetings as much as layouts. I find myself in rooms with CPOs and PMs and engineers, helping people be less afraid of making a mistake.
The practical shift is this: at Senior level, you’re asking “how do we build this well?” At Staff, you’re asking “should we be building this at all, and if so, why?”
That’s a harder question to answer. It requires a different kind of confidence — not in your craft, but in your judgment.
Mo: A few concrete patterns:
They create systems others can leverage. Instead of solving a problem for a single feature, they shape patterns that multiple teams can use — a scalable onboarding structure, interaction patterns other teams adopt, how memberships or incentives work across the product. The impact compounds.
They rally people around the work. At this level, you rarely operate through authority. You operate through clarity and momentum — explaining complex product problems clearly, bringing teams into the thinking early, presenting ideas in ways leadership understands.
They bring intentionality. Strong designers are deliberate about why a decision is made, what trade-offs exist, and how the work connects to the broader product. The more intentional you become, the easier it is to articulate your thinking, build conviction around ideas, and earn trust with teams and leadership. Over time, that trust compounds.
For example, at Personio, I owned mobile architecture and built the native iOS and Android apps from the ground up.
At that level of seniority, the work before the work becomes most of the job: aligning product, engineering, brand, and platform teams around a shared vision for what mobile should be.
You become a partner in how the brand translates to a native surface, how theming gets built with engineers, and how workflows like time tracking behave across mobile and desktop.
Your scope is mobile, but you’re shaping decisions well beyond it. And you’re still making things. One day, you’re deep in compliance for location-bound time tracking and geofencing; the next, you’re in code, prototyping motion and interaction that prove an HR tool can feel as good as it works. What we shipped and overhauled contributed directly to:
App adoption growing from ~40K to ~200K monthly active users
Mobile-related deal loss dropping from over 8% to 0.2%
A 5x increase in time tracking adoption on mobile
5. What’s the one thing you’d tell a Senior Designer to start doing this week if they want to make the transition?
Rachel: The shift from Senior to Staff or Lead Designer isn't about doing more; it’s about learning to think and act in multipliers.
As a Senior, your impact is mostly local. You own a surface, you solve problems within it, you ship work you're proud of.
But at the Staff/Lead level, the question changes. It's no longer what did you make? It's what your presence made possible across your peers, across product domains, across the business?
In practice, it’s about thinking in systems and bringing clarity to the future of your product area.
You're the person who notices that two teams are solving the same problem from opposite ends and that if they worked together, you'd have something neither could build alone. One product quietly activating adoption in another. One experience flowing into the next so naturally it feels inevitable. Thinking in systems results in building a competitive edge from coherence.
The second shift is your relationship with time and ambition. Staff-level thinking means holding the big-picture ambition across the organisation and asking “what's the highest-leverage move we can all take today?” The first step that de-risks yet raises the ceiling for everything that follows?
Ambition without a next step is just wasted energy. Our job is to convert that energy.
Finally, it’s how you influence your peers across product, business and increasingly AI agents.
Start by getting genuinely curious about what matters most to the people you need to move: what are the biggest decisions that would make or break their work, where do they feel stuck, what would make their work flow? Build trust so you can challenge and be challenged. The quality of those conversations and relationships determines the quality of your impact.
Whether you're a direct people manager or leading through influence alone, all of this requires restraint. You are the one who creates the conditions for others to solve problems better than you alone would have.
Something tactical you can do today:
Map out where your current impact ends on projects.
Where do decisions get made without you?
Where does your work lose impact in translation?
Who haven't you had a real conversation with yet, that you probably should?
Pick one and start there.
Conclusion:
Senior designers ship great features.
Staff designers help the product make sense as a whole.
Every company has different job levels, so my advice when assessing companies to work for and how to level up is to focus on the outcomes they require rather than the title.
Job titles do not matter; the work does. Many design teams are quietly dropping titles. They are moving to everyone just being “Designer” externally, but keeping internal levelling.
A few reasons I see:
Teams want flatter structures, so decisions move faster and less energy goes into company politics.
Scope and impact now matter more than titles. AI is blurring roles so fast. Someone with 3 years of experience might know more about AI than someone with 20+.
To focus on hiring designers focused on just the work, and obsessing about the craft of design.
TL;DR: When looking at jobs, focus on the work, not the title.
Until next time!