Operating as a Senior Product Designer
Q&A with Chhavi Shrivastava (Design Lead at Preply)
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 do not know how to hire, attract and retain talent. The end result is designers get out of their depth down the line, dilutes the quality of the levelling internally, they struggle to make an impact at the right levels and results in poor design utilisation in their organisation.
The most common job inflation I see is people who think they are senior vs staff vs principal.
In this article I speak with Chhavi Shrivastava a Design Lead at Preply to discuss how to operate at the senior levels as an IC.
TL;DR:
How to level up as a Product Designer
Exploring different levels of being a product designer
What it takes to operate at senior levels
Instead of career ladders we need spectrums
Why it’s important to discuss this topic
When Tom & I had a coffee chat a few weeks ago, we touched on various topics from AI to designers building businesses and creating content and navigating the current job market. We both gravitated towards design leveling -
Tom for obvious reasons. He works day in and day out with designers and companies at all scales assessing these levels and finding the right match.
For me, having personally navigating these levels I have found levels to be very subjective as I moved towards senior levels. This subjectivity even became more intriguing to me as every time I moved countries (India > Europe > UK), it felt like the levels also moved.
And as a person who loves frameworks and objectivity, I have spent time thinking through this through a lens of a designer and more recently as a design manager hiring for my team.
To add a disclaimer upfront to this conversation, in no way I claim to be an expert or come with decades of experience on this topic - my hope in writing this is to provides you with some guide on design leveling from my point of view. And that also it prompts other discussion threads that build on this & drive more clarity around difference between mid-level, senior & staff titles.
Introduction to Chhavi
My design journey started with a 4 year intensive design bachelors program in a top Indian institute (Department of Design, IIT Guwahati). The exposure to professors, creators with decades of experience in typography, ergonomics, physical product design really helped me develop my taste as a designer.
I started my digital product design career with bunch of design internships at agencies & big tech and have lived & worked in Bangalore, Barcelona (N26) and London (Bumble, Preply). Currently I am in a hybrid role where I manage a team of 6 designers (staff, senior & mid-levels) and also lead hands-on initiatives at strategic level. I write my own newsletter that you can find here.
Q: How can you level-up as a product designer? Especially with AI now in the picture and not going anywhere?
If you have been following recent convos on rise of AI tools and what it brings to the table - now everyone can build. What that highlights is the importance of knowing what to build, and your taste/craft starts acting as a differentiator.
For me personally, I would arrange the skills of a product designer almost as a spectrum of skills.
Taste: Knowing what good looks like is a skill you can build. That’s why it’s not limited to designers - you will find so many engineers and product managers who have a good taste. How is that? Developing a taste is an intentional practice. And as a designer, it should integrated in your life. That’s why so many designers are into art museums, pottery, old magazines, tasteful furniture. It’s just good taste that is then reflected in their work.
Craft: This is where you differentiate yourself as a builder and a designer. You have taste, you know what good looks like in your head - AND you have the skills to translate that into UI. Almost all founders & senior PMs I have worked with know what should the ideal end product look like but they often lack the skills to do it, and sometimes even find it hard to articulate actionnable feedback. That’s why craft is crucial. Execution: As a designer if you work in a cave, you won’t go far. Being able to work with a cross-functional team to translate your designs into something that can be built is key.
Management: If you working in tech, you are working with humans (sp far). If there are human emotions, there are expectations & conflicts. An artist need not deal with a group of PMs & engineers, but as a product designer you need to!
Influence & Bar Raising: You define what good looks like and then you guard it. More on it in later sections.
You often can’t work on one without working on the other. You can’t build skills to influence if you don’t know how to execute. Your craft is mellow if you don’t have taste.
You also continuously work on it. Sure you can have good taste, but then trends change and what good looks like changes. (So would you use skeuomorphism? Depends on what year you ask me and where we wanna use it!)
All of this has a layer of proficiency in AI tools which will be a given requirement for any design & PM role.
Q: How do you think of different levels against this spectrum of skillsets?
When you are starting out, knowing what good looks like and having skills to create that is the most important. This is also where you need most amount of coaching.
As you start finding your feet in the industry and start tending towards senior, it becomes important to know how to make it work in teams. I would also call this the messy middle (you start venturing into the soft skills arena where stakeholder management & influence starts showing up in your reviews)
When you make the transition to lead & staff designer level, you have to learn to design through others - so being able to give actionable feedback and covering a broad scope is the bare minimum.
You will start leading 2 or 3 verticles [breadth] or working on the most complex/hardest part of product [depth]. This is also the time in personal reflection if you want to go more on management track or stay firmly on the IC track.
How you navigate these levels is a based on a lot of intrinsic motivation and having durable energy sources. And the subjectivity starts showing in the soft skills arena.
Operating at the senior levels
Here’s where you could be moving back & forth between levels & titles - and a lot of misleveling happens (you are a lead in a startup, and take on a senior role in big tech and vice versa).
Signals are also hard to capture in our current methods of design interviewing. Role of personal brand, how well you interview, and your timing of being at the right place at right time starts taking into play.
What we are also starting to see now is a lot of course correction by the design industry in exactly the same space.
Instead of a career ladder, I am now tempted to start thinking of it in terms of spectrum. It helps to capture the nuances of how well you execute - how you influence & do you bar raise.
Q: As designers navigating, what are some foundational advice you are following?
Some foundational basics you can always fall back on while navigating this.
Never stop working on your taste & craft. A designer should always have their personal taste and craft skills to match that taste. I feel like a lot of director/VP design level folks miss either taste or craft skills.
To make your design career AI-proof, where you stand between execution → bar raiser on the spectrum will matter.
Q: What do you look for in the first 30 seconds of a portfolio?
The basics - does it have good navigation, how does the first scroll from top to bottom feel like. Can I quickly orient myself to start deep-diving into case studies. Anything that stands out? Like a quick video of person introducing myself, any interesting tab I would love to check out after case studies (usually is a bookshelf, or a blog, or side projects).
The portfolios itself are a reflection of you as a designer - your taste & boldness. A well done portfolio is almost half the battle won in an interviewing process I feel! It shows how much you care, your taste and how are your skills matching up to it.
Q: When looking at a portfolio, what are you expecting to see in a senior portfolio vs mid-level?
This one is tricky and most hiring managers will likely look for signals for levelling during the portfolio presentation/whiteboarding rounds. Some signals could be
Breadth of work presented in the selected 3-4 case studies (mobile vs desktop)
Scale & impact on business metrics like growth, retention, optimizations, etc (end to end redesigned flows or optimizations)
Size of team & autonomy (only designer vs working with a lead designer) I would also personally scan for projects that were built vs university/ side projects.
Q: If you were speaking to someone reading this who feels stuck in their career and doesn’t feel valued in their job, believes they can be a great designer, but the company doesn’t see their value, what advice would you have?
I have always worked with the ground rule that I am responsible for my own career - and things that I am not changing, I am choosing. If I am not changing my job, I am choosing it. If I am prioritising a season in my personal life (relationship, health, family) - I am choosing it over professional growth. And that’s been a helpful narrative to have in my head to avoid feeling like a victim or feeling stuck.
There were a few months I chose to stay stuck in a job just because I had other things I wanted to choose & change first.
When it is your season of choosing professional growth - I would go out and look for a new job, or start building on the side (it could be apps, digital products, or even content creation). With the tech landscape we are in right now, it couldn’t be a more perfect time to take ownership.
Until next time!
I'm a Product Director turned designer and this is such a great way of litmus testing design sense. Enjoyed reading this