?? How successful designers stand out

Hi design friends,

?? Huge welcome to the 1,348 designers who have joined us since our last issue!

This week I’m sharing a sneak peek of something I’ve been working on for the last several weeks (and will be working on for several more). I’ve been studying dozens of UX skill and career frameworks to understand how to help designers take more control of their career.

If that sounds interesting, you can follow along to be notified as I make progress on this project.

We appreciate your feedback about the new newsletter format and we’re giving it another try this week.

Happy designing,

— Taylor & Jordan

???How successful designers stand out

You may have been on a design team with someone who outpaced everyone else on the team. Or maybe you are that person. They’re promoted quickly, other departments want to work with them, and they’ll sometimes leave the company for a crazy raise and a huge skip-level promotion.

What makes the difference between these designers and the rest?

I’ve been poring over dozens of product design skill frameworks to understand how different designers behave and grow.

Though the words and names vary, I uncovered a structure to what we universally call “design skills”:

Not every skill framework may categorize them as clearly as this, but if you read between the lines you’ll see the presence of these three categories.

Though it may seem like it, high-performing designers have not mastered every design skill in the book. These designers are usually highly skilled in one of these areas, and know how to play to their strengths.

(Disclaimer: these categories and descriptions may change or evolve as I keep synthesizing)

?? Behavioral skills

Foundational skills. Your universal approach to any kind of work. These are the skills that others would recognize in you even if you switched careers (sometimes known as “soft skills”). You may be strong in this area if you get along with your teammates, if others lean on your for presentations, or if your projects are always completed on time.

?? Specialized skills

Skills unique to your design practice (research, UX, visual, etc). These are the skills you have because of your education, or training, or experience (sometimes known as “hard skills”). Just like the other categories, these are different for every product designer. These skills may be more or less apparent depending on the project you’re working on. Some designers may even go so deep into these skills that they break into another specialization (such as a user researcher, or design ops).

?? Business skills

Skills specific to your company or team because of the way it functions. These usually deepen the longer you remain on the team or at the company. It involves deeply knowing your market, your customers, and how teams around you operate. These skills change based on engineering cadences (eg. agile vs waterfall), industries (eg. healthcare vs finance), or even company profiles (eg. sales-led vs product-led).

I found a lot of success early in my career by relying on my behavioral skills. People began to notice me because I was fast and quickly made sense of messy, ambiguous projects that were falling behind.

Which category is your strength? How can you use it to your advantage? Growth is a balance of leaning on your strengths while continuing to develop your weaknesses.

Can you do me a favor? If you know of any Product Design or UX career frameworks around the web (jr, sr, principal, etc), will you share them with me, Taylor Palmer or drop it in the comments? Thanks!

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?? Scoop

What’s going on in the world of product design and why it matters.

Many people are being let go from their jobs, while others are willfully leaving the industry. The Google Layoffs are the latest in a very long line tech layoffs that are affecting the life of tens of thousands of people and families. Another well known designer in the industry is leaving UX (and sharing her experience on the way out).

Our Take

The endless layoffs should be a reminder to us that work should be about providing for and fulfilling ourselves, not our employers. For many companies (especially extremely large ones) employees are simply resources to be utilized, exhausted, and discarded—which seems to be the case as Microsoft appeared to prioritize a very expensive private concert over retaining its employees.

Meanwhile, other great designers among us are choosing to leave after growing tired of toxic experiences. If you have a minute, I would also recommend reading Lisa’s thread with several dozen anecdotes about UX industry concerns. We can become (or educate) the next generation of designers to push past many of the obstacles of the past and present.

?? Gems

Quick piece of advice to consider this week.

That's it for this week.

What's on your mind? Let's chat in the comments.