Every designer could grow professionally at least twice if their design manager is concerned about growing their skills systematically. Some of them could become team’s stars, feeling the courage.

Org structure analysis will show current roles in a team [see pattern T: Org structure]. It’ll also help to highlight strong and weak sides, as well as missing people. We already discussed hiring [see pattern O: Hiring]. Let’s focus on making existing team members stronger: designers, UX researchers, and UX writers.

Org structure and strategy will show where company’s going and what professionals you’ll need for that. I.e., there’s a solid lack of visual design or, vice versa — it’s fine already, but decisions don’t consider user needs.

We aim for T-shaped designers [see pattern O: T-shaped designers] — several multiskilled people, each of them with their own strong sides; it will give a proper combination of skills. We’ll have a linkage of designers, each of whom has several strong skills. The more designers skew toward being systems thinkers, the more likely they will create boring designs, while designers who are creatives are likely to create impractical solutions that are not scalable. Either of these types of designers will suffer their own limitations when they’re working alone, but they could make giant leaps when working together.

People participate in these professional growth processes by different reasons:

To understand the current capabilities of an existing Design team, you must assess the skills and knowledge of every designer on the team — for example, skills like motion design or heuristic evaluation — using a classic skills/knowledge matrix.

When evaluating a Design team, I assess the level of each designer’s skills and knowledge, using the following four levels:

You may need to promote current team members, improve the necessary skills within the team or the entire company, or hire new designers to fill the gaps. In contrast, if a team possesses enough skills in certain areas, you can de-emphasize those skills requirements when making future hires. Instead, you could hire designers who have unique experience
or skills that would enrich your team.

There’s no need for a designer to have all the skills on a maximum level. There’s a set of key skills for a T-shaped designer in a product team (let’s say Interaction design and Visual design should be no less than 2.5 across the team). There are experts and novices who are here to grow. If we talk about supplementary skills, it’s not necessary to have even 2 here — at least more than 1.

A skill-knowledge matrix also helps in hiring [see pattern O: Hiring]. If you’re considering several candidates and they have a similar professional level in key skills (i.e., they can create a great design concept, which will have well thought-out interaction design and modern visual design, as well as good reasoning describing their solution). However, if a design team is strong enough here, you can look at supplementary skills of these candidates. Let’s say one of them has front-end experience or can create illustrations — then we will favor this person, because he/she will strengthen a design team overall. After all, we already have basic skills on a strong level and even if this person has a small dipping in one of them, we will improve it quickly with so many colleagues having it already, so summary skillset of a design team will improve by means of rare specializations.

Career paths are predictable with a unified skillset.

When skills and zones of responsibilities grow, it often leads to position (or grade) upgrade. It’s a good way to motivate an employee to grow and highlight their successes. However, what’s really important is the level of challenges they solve and responsibility they take; badges are secondary.

Standard levels:

Profiles allow you to:

Higher level designers could hardly develop by just improving hard skills. As a rule, they deal with people management more and set up processes. Their focus moves into soft and leadership skills growth. Expert side is still important and shouldn’t degrade, but it couldn’t scale their impact alone.

There are several ways to develop a higher-level designer further: 

Not every professional wants to manage, and not everyone can. That’s why management way shouldn’t be the only option to have bigger salary and recognition in a company. You should define levels for both of these career paths, except of product owner — it’s about moving to another profession.

Design manager:

Principal:

It’s important when designer positions match general approach in a company. However, if a company uses a ready-made framework like Willis Towers Watson with standard grades, you can have two layers. I.e., “lead designer” title could have “vice president” grade.

A designer and a design manager assess current skills. We get a report on strong and weak sides. 

You’ll get a team overview after assessing all designers. What skills are presented enough, what should you improve, and where you don’t have enough qualification.

It’s important to have high average level for key skills to execute design strategy. Secondly, you need experts with maximum level that’ll raise the bar and help to develop others. As a last resort it could be a person within a company, not your team. It’s worse if you have to go to outsourcers.

For a long time, there weren’t any specialized tools to run skill-knowledge matrices for designers. So, companies tried two ways:

We discussed feedback in detail while discussing design [see pattern O: Design critique sessions]. It’s also important when you’re discussing a designer as a professional.

A simple model:

A good design manager not just pushes pixels and directs what to do. He/she coaches — leads a designer to come to a solution themselves. Moreover, they would think about several alternatives and choose the best. Then they would not just fix a particular situation, but also learn to solve similar situations in the future. Mentorship, when you propose solution in mode vivid way — is a good approach for younger designers. Remember about situational leadership [see pattern O: A design leader] to choose a suitable option. Somebody would need master and apprentice model when you work on a task together and a designer learns on the way. Matt Griffin from Shopifydescribes this practice in a simple way:

Adapting teaching methodology:

A UX team constantly needs to grow and evolve. Designers can take on new challenges and solve more complex tasks to become stronger and gain wisdom. Growing your team’s skills requires:

To ensure designers don’t become apathetic because of overly routine work, keep looking into different approaches and switch people off their main product tasks at intervals. There are three types of tasks:

Good ratio for these three types of tasks is 70:20:10. Although team’s primary focus is on product work, but there are also a lot of new professional challenges that move my people forward professionally and help them to love their job. Visionary tasks often explore the boundaries of what we know about a problem, our current skills and knowledge, and time and resources.

In recent years, more and more companies started to develop designers systematically. There are lots of examples that simple solve the task. However, some of them do it in an interesting way.

In a pattern “O: T-shaped designers” you made a basic list of product designer skills. Take it as a basis and enhance: