Crucial Points of Reflection: Managers POV

• Tell me how and why you’ve made your design decisions. What constraints and outside factors influenced the result? I expect to see a process/structure that makes it easy for others to follow along.
• How did you collaborate with/influence Product, Dev, stakeholders into making the right decision or the process needed to arrive at a sound decision.
• Tell me about how you collaborate and assist other designers with design.
• Takeaway: Good work is never based on your efforts alone. The expectation for a senior designer is to have more impact that just their work alone.

Written by Cheryl Chung

Unless you’re aiming for a principle senior position (even in which case your work needs to be more than just “your work”), seniors are beacons in an org that align the teams with their guidance and work, and are often the funnel through which much of the org’s strategies, needs, and problems are directed into the design department as a whole.

You may not manage, but you can be sure people will be looking to you constantly. If you’re not someone that people can look forwards to, or lean on for guidance/mentorship, then you’re probably needing to work on those skills first.

Essence: seniors have and exemplify all the soft skills that you dont teach, but are earned and learned. That’s their biggest differentiator imo.

Written by Andrew MacDonald

Do You:

• Have deep domain knowledge of your product area; if you are the most senior designer for your squad, you are the SME in everything that Design interfaces with.
• Refine and improve the long-term direction of how your product area evolves while helping your peers and colleagues understand the product, the future vision, and how we’ll achieve it
• Have influence when working with partners on their approach, strategy, and processes; that includes actively ensuring a high degree of execution on all fronts
• Work with Product in defining success measurements for features you work on
• Ownership over all the complex design debt in your product area and advocate for opportunities to address it