Contributors vs. Managers

The design industry really messed me up with the career path problem. “Should I go IC or management” has plagued me across many pivots in my path to where I am today. Now, I question if that distinction even makes sense anymore.

I've worked at companies where the best design leader was also the best designer on the team. I've worked at companies where the design leader hadn't opened Figma in two years. To me, the first model produced better work. The second model produced better organizations.

The argument for separating the tracks is that managing people is a full-time job. That's true at a certain scale. When you have 30 designers and a complex org to navigate, the management work is genuinely all-consuming. But that argument is getting weaker. AI tooling is compressing what a small team can do. The number of designers you need for a given scope is shrinking. Which means the management overhead is shrinking too.

What's emerging is something that looks more like a player-coach model. You set the strategy. You hire and develop the team. And you still make the thing. Not because you don't trust your team. Because staying in the work is how you maintain the taste that makes your strategic decisions any good.

The leaders I admire most never fully left the craft. Albeit, many of those are not designers. (I’m talking musicians, artists, athletes.) The ones who stopped making things eventually lost the thread. Their taste calcified. Their feedback got generic. "Make it feel more premium" instead of actually showing what premium looks like.

The industry is going to keep bifurcating into two types of design leaders. The ones who manage designers and the ones who lead design. The difference is whether you can still sit down and do the work yourself when it matters. (And I think that will matter now more than ever.)