As UX/Design leaders, perhaps our greatest responsibility is to the people we manage and lead. In the latest episode of Finding Our Way, Jesse James Garrett and I addressed just how poorly we are doing to support Senior Practitioners, by which I mean folks who are about 5-10 years into their career, strong at the core of their craft, and don't need much oversight.
In my UX/Design Organizational Health findings, these Senior practitioners typically score 5-10% lower than average across the board. I have hypotheses as to why:
We hire Senior practitioners because they don't need management and oversight and can be trusted to make good design decisions on their own, but then:
1️⃣ As the lone designer in an 'agile' product development team, they are expected to do all the design, which includes a lot of rudimentary work (onboarding flows and the like) which they've done for years now. So they feel stuck, unable to grow their craft and practice.
2️⃣ UX/Design is typically under-leveled relative to their peers, meaning Senior Designers (not seen yet as formal leaders) are partnered with Lead or even Director-level PMs and Engineers (who are seen as formal leaders), which leads to being overruled when disagreements arise.
3️⃣ They face what Jesse calls "the empowerment cliff": 3-5 years of demonstrated competence, proven ability to deliver sophisticated results, but zero increase in empowerment. Competence grows, agency doesn't.
4️⃣ Design orgs are generally poor at articulating a growth path for their members, and so these Senior practitioners don't understand what's expected in order to advance. Once they hit lead/staff level, they can make their own path. But at the senior level, they're stuck without guidance.
This connects with another org issue we discussed, which is how many UX/Design organizations forgot how to be strategic and more deeply impactful. The past 15 years, most of these orgs have focused on incremental improvements and shipping features. Now many recognize the need for an integrative vision, and our staff don't know how, because they've been stuck in their craft (see point 1️⃣).
🚨 My fear is that this early-career burnout means many potentially talented folks are lost to UX/Design. We hired or promoted them for their competence. We're losing them because we won't give them agency. We say we value them, then structure their roles to be repetitive, disempowered, and going nowhere.
It looks like a retention problem. But it is a leadership failure.
