Designing Your Next Career Move
As the calendar turns, many designers find themselves reflecting on the past year and wondering what comes next. Career conversations with colleagues often circle around the same questions: Am I growing? Am I in the right role? What should 2026 look like?
Rather than letting another year happen by reactively, a few structured exercises can help bring clarity to where you stand and where you want to go.
Start With a Personal Retrospective
Years of reacting to opportunities as they came along can feel easy and straightforward, but it doesn’t always lead to intentional growth. One annual ritual that can change that dynamic is a thorough retrospective of the past year — successes, mistakes, good moments, bad moments, things loved, and things that need changing.
Sitting down with paper and pencil for a few hours at year’s end, you look back at memories, projects, and events that stood out. Then you take notes on where you stand in terms of personal growth, professional work, and social connections — and how you want to grow in each area.
Key questions to answer include:
- What did I find most rewarding and fulfilling last year?
- What fears and concerns slowed me down the most?
- What could I leave behind, give away, or simplify?
- What tasks would be good to delegate or automate?
- What are my 3 priorities to grow this upcoming year?
- What times do I block in my calendar for my priorities?
Assess Your UX Skills
For professional growth, the UX Skills Self-Assessment Matrix (Figma template) by Maigen Thomas is a useful tool. It helps you sort out what you want to do more of, what you’d rather do less, and where your current learning curve lies against where you already feel confident.
The exercise takes roughly 20–30 minutes and helps identify the UX skills that sit in the sweet spot — typically the upper half of the canvas. You’ll also mark areas where you’re improving and areas where you’re already strong. Reviewed year after year, it serves as a useful reality check and reminder of your trajectory.
Career Models for Design Systems and Beyond
Javier Cuello put together a Career Levels For Design System Teams (Figma Kit) that maps progression levels — Junior, Semi-Senior, Senior, and Staff — to key development areas, with skills and responsibilities for each stage. It’s designed for product designers moving into design systems work or managers building a career matrix.
What makes the model valuable is how it maps strategy and impact alongside systematic thinking and governance. Designers often shine at the tactical level — elegant UI components, clean file organization in Figma — but can lag behind on strategic decisions.
Seniority largely comes down to a shift from tactical initiatives to strategic decisions. That means proactively spotting organizational challenges a design system could address, inviting the right people early, and embedding yourself in other teams when needed. It also means watching for situations where design systems tend to fail, and making it harder for that to happen. When deadlines tighten, it involves adapting the workflow around the system to still ship — but with a clear plan for paying down accumulating UX debt later.
Rethinking the Career Ladder
Career progression is commonly assumed to lead toward management. But management isn’t the only viable path, nor always the ideal one. Some designers prefer diving deep into complex UX flows and intricate details. At some point, though, you might feel growth has stalled — perhaps due to an organizational ceiling or limited room for exploration.
Ryan Ford’s Mirror Model offers a helpful framework for thinking about next steps. It lays out possible career paths and expectations so you can advocate for a position or influence you want to reach. The idea is to study and decide on your own first, then bring it up for discussion.
Often, internal opportunities already exist. Before switching companies, consider changing teams or shaping a more fulfilling role where you are. Jason Mesut’s observation reinforces this point: career ladders assume you can go up, down, or fall off — but in practice, you can move up, move down, and move sideways. Vertical progression alone doesn’t feel healthy given the diversity of career paths ahead.
Promoting just the vertical progression doesn’t feel healthy, especially in such a diverse world of work, and diverse careers ahead of us all.
Shaping a Role Rather Than Filling One
Zooming out from the ladder metaphor, consider where your interests actually lie. Look for intersections — between business needs and user needs, problem space and solution space, strategic decisions and operations. Sometimes you don’t need to climb at all; you just need to find the spot that brings your expertise to light and maximizes impact.
Roles worth exploring might involve acting as a “translator” between design and engineering, specializing in UX and accessibility. Others might focus on automating design processes with AI, improving workflow efficiency, or owning internal search UX or legacy systems.
These roles rarely show up on job boards, though they can carry tremendous impact for a business. Spotting such a gap and proactively raising it with senior management could let you shape a role built around your strengths, rather than trying to squeeze into a predefined position.
Humans, Not Just AI
Designing AI experiences is a skill worth sharpening, but the point isn’t about replacing design work with AI automation. In fact, there’s a growing craving for genuine human experience — built by humans, attentive to human needs and intentions, tested with humans, embedding human values, and working well for people.
Rather than becoming obsessed with AI, the better focus remains humans. AI amplifies the need for authenticity, curation, critical thinking, and strategy — all skills that will matter deeply in 2026. Designers who can craft AI experiences that people understand, value, use, and trust will be in demand.
No technology can conjure clarity, structure, trust, and care out of poor content, poor metadata, or poor value for end users. Solid fundamentals of good design, paired with a genuine focus on human needs and struggles, let designers bridge the gap between users and businesses in a way AI cannot replicate.
Finding Clarity
These tools and exercises — the retrospective, the skills matrix, the career models — all point toward one outcome: clarity. Clarity on where you are and where you actually want to go.
They also serve as conversation starters, whether you review them alone or with your manager. But one caveat worth keeping in mind: refine the role to amplify your strengths, rather than forcing yourself to match a role perfectly.
The value you bring to your team and company is real. Sometimes it just needs to be highlighted, or gently guided toward the spot where it can shine.
Career Scaffolding: Tools and Frameworks That Help
Given the fragmentation of roles and expectations in design, the industry has steadily produced frameworks intended to bring clarity. These are not rigid job descriptions but working instruments—best used as conversation starters during reviews, 1:1s, or quarterly planning.
Among the more widely referenced templates is Maigen Thomas’s UX Skills Self-Assessment Matrix, available as a Figma community file. It lets designers map their perceived competence across a range of UX skills, which supports both self-directed growth plans and calibration conversations with managers.
For those trying to make sense of vertical progression, Ryan Ford’s “Product Designer’s Career Levels Paths” outlines distinct levels and expectations, with an accompanying PNG for quick reference. Similarly, Shannon E. Thomas proposes a “Design Team’s Growth Matrix” that connects individual goals with org-level outcomes—useful when a team is trying to define what “senior” actually means internally.
Mapping the Road Ahead
Two contributions from Lily Yue provide complementary views on lateral moves. A Career Decision Map For UX Designers helps weigh whether to double down on UX craft, branch into product management, or move toward leadership. Her second map, Diverse Career Paths For UX Designers, visualizes non-linear trajectories that include research, content design, and strategy roles. Both are distributed as PNGs via LinkedIn and are handy for portfolio conversations.
Jason Mesut’s Medium publication “Shaping Designers and Design Teams” collects essays and frameworks on how design orgs can mature. For hands-on planning, Paóla Quintero offers a UX Skills Self-Assessment Map template on Miro, a spatial alternative to spreadsheet-based methods.
Role-Specific Frameworks
Frameworks are becoming specialized by discipline, not just by level. Rachel Krause of NN/g has published a UX Skill Mapping Template in Google Sheets that breaks out research and evaluation skills from design skills. Figma has made its own Product Design & Writing Career Levels public as a Figma community file, providing calibration specific to product design and adjacent writing roles.
On the content side, Tempo offers Content Design Role Frameworks via a Miro template. For research, Nikki Anderson’s UX Research Career Framework, published on dscout’s People Nerds, outlines a path from junior researcher to research leadership, complete with sample responsibilities and outputs at each stage.
If you prefer a deeper read, Christopher Nguyen’s free eBook UX Career Ladders compiles leveling guidance across several companies—useful for comparative study when building your own ladder. Aaron James’s Product Design Level Expectations, a Google Sheets document, takes a similar comparative approach, listing what leading companies expect of designers at each level.
