The Staff Designer

Disambiguating the ambiguous

One of the most frequent questions I get is ‘what the f@#k is a Staff Designer?’ and how is that different from a Manager or other design functions. To be fair, the role is pretty new to the design industry and not as common (or sort after) as a Senior Designer.

Eight years ago I took a role as Principal Designer — A position that was leveled in line with a Senior Manager and reported straight to a Director. At the time, the responsibilities and expectations were ‘ambiguous’ at best, meaning there wasn’t a clear-cut guide or playbook and for the most part you were just perceived as being a senior-senior designer.

Fast forward almost a decade, Principal Designers are more commonly known as ‘Staff Designers’, and while there’s more awareness around dual-track career paths (IC vs Manager) the role of a Staff/Principal designer is still in some ways just as ambiguous — and not just for those who occupy the position, but also for those looking to attain it.

I’ve mused quite a bit with friends and co-workers about why this is still the case. The first reason I think is attributed to secret private leveling systems which force Staff designers to work in the shadows for the most part. In contrast, Managers at the same level are visible leaders by rank and title and rarely need to explain their role. The second reason that contributes to this ambiguity is a lack of visibility and clarity around responsibilities and how they differ from Senior Designers and even Managers (of which there is a clear intersection).

On the ground, ambiguity often plays out across design teams in the form of uncertainty around career progression (those looking to level up on the IC track), missed allocation of work that insufficiently meets the expectations of the role; and product and engineering partners who assume you’re just a senior-senior designer assigned to execute against a pre-ordained roadmap… but are left wondering why their design-resource is facilitating a design sprint for another team or spending 25% of their time on people and culture.

So how do we disambiguate the ambiguous? Catchy buzz phrases like ‘lead without authority, ‘scale your impact’, or ‘influence change’ offers little insight into the practical nature of being a Staff designer. What we need are more tangible examples of what success looks like and how to achieve it. For me, this involves breaking down my day-to-day and examining what actions have led to successful outcomes.

Anatomy of a Staff Designer

I look at my role as a staff designer through the lens of four quadrants (or buckets). This helps me compartmentalize my efforts over 3–6 months and ensures I’m not over-indexing on one aspect of my role over another.

1. Vision & Strategy
   Shaping current & future work
2. Design Excellence
   Ensuring outstanding product design quality
3. Execution & Delivery
   Solving complex problems in collaboration with XFN partners
4. People & Culture
   Building teams and contributing to internal and external communities

Vision and Strategy

Vision and strategy are by far my biggest super-power and where I thrive. I love setting a vision through design sprints and then defining a strategy with product partners that sets the team on a path towards a north star. Vision and Strategy can take many forms, some more intentional than others, but the key is to be persistent in your pursuit of long-term thinking.

Practical examples of Vision and Strategy:

• Planning, facilitating and participating in design sprints
• Influencing team strategy & roadmaps through discovery work
• Pitching ideas to design and product leadership regularly
• Participating in company hackathons
• Examining the second and third-order effects of any given decision
• Always designing with a future state in mind (ie ‘looking around the corner’)
• Considering the whole along with the individual parts

Design Excellence

Design excellence is all about setting and maintaining the quality bar in your team. This means that you’re a passionate advocate for craft (visual design and interaction design), design systems (contributing to and maintaining), and processes (installing and evolving where necessary).

Practical examples of Design Excellence:

• Facilitate and participate in Design Crit
• Facilitate and participate in Design Leadership Reviews
• Develop tools or templates that improve design workflows or increase productivity, efficiency, consistency, and quality
• Lead by example by producing high-quality work no matter how big or small the task may be.
• Operate at the lowest level of detail from understanding the problem you’re solving through research and data, to prototyping interactions and pushing pixels.

Execution and Delivery

Execution and delivery is a bucket that requires constant attention. Generally speaking, if you’re leading a product area you’ll be working alongside Product Managers and Engineers who’s motivations and incentives are often misaligned with your own (ie move fast, ship experiments, think short term). As a Senior Designer you’ll spend roughly around 50–60% of your time in this zone, but as a Staff Designer, your time allocation is dramatically reduced to around 25% due to other commitments. This means you have to be intentional about how you spend your time with that team (often pushing back on meetings) and being more rigorous around project allocation to ensure you’re not bogged down in incremental improvements.

Practical examples of Execution and Delivery:

• Lead complex, critical, and ambiguous projects from concept to ship
• Set clear expectations with product partners on what success looks like for designers
• Develop strong product recommendations backed by research and data
• Deliver solutions that are systematic and have a broader impact outside of your current product area
• Push back on projects that are too incremental
• Be conscious of your time and guard your calendar

People and Culture

Actively participating in and fostering a healthy design team culture is key to the success of a Staff Designer. This is where my responsibilities intersect with Management considerably and where I spend a lot of time working with Design managers to orchestrate — It’s also the most rewarding part of the job.

Practical examples of People and Culture:

• Set rituals and cadences for the team to connect both formally and informally
• Actively mentor individuals internally and externally
• Facilitate coaching circles on topics such as Prototyping or Presentation skills
• Regularly share design process (Sprints, Reviews, XFN Collaboration)
• Be a design evangelist (East, West, North, and South)
• Be a design onboarding buddy
• Present at company All-hands regularly
• Ensure the design team is up to date with the latest tools and trends
• Recruit and interview candidates
• Be involved in an intern program
• Assess the team health through 1:1s and manager-less retrospectives

Advocacy

lastly, while the above are all great examples of things that are within your control, one aspect that’s worth mentioning which has a direct correlation and material impact on your success as a Staff Designer is advocacy. Without advocacy from your peers and other leaders in your org, you’re limited to potential opportunities that will satisfy the expectations of your level. This is something I learned the hard way and speaks to a point I made early around visibility and private leveling systems. If you don’t have strong advocates (preferably at a director level), being seen and heard becomes infinitely harder.

To that end, I’m also a strong believer that greatness is found in the agency of others. To be a successful leader in any position you need to rely on the skills and advocacy of those around you. This is no less true for a Staff designer. I’d argue that developing strong relationships above all else (regardless of role, title, or bucket) is the single most important ingredient to not only being successful in your role but also being fulfilled.

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