Welcome back. I have a confession: I don’t love listening to design podcasts. I know, I know—someone who’s all about leveling up your career with self-taught tactics should *probably* be more into podcasts. But I haven’t been…at least not until now. I recently found two shows I love: Sneak Peek, which gives listeners an inside look at top designers’ Figma files, and Dive Club, which features interviews with super talented designers from some of the biggest firms around.

Do you listen to design podcasts? Hit reply and tell me your picks. ▶️

—Tommy (@DesignerTom)

The Wireframe:

• Carving the path to your next big thing
• The tools to land a killer job in design
• My favorite courses of all time

6 Habits to Become a Senior Designer

Here’s one of the biggest myths in design: The only way to become a senior designer is to put in your years doing grunt work. It’s all about time.

The reality? Couldn’t be further from that. There’s no amount of years on the job that makes you ready for the next step—to become a leader on your design team. It’s really about learning to become a high-impact problem solver. That’s the defining factor of all of the most talented senior designers I know.

Want to become a high-impact problem solver…in five years or less? You’ve got to start thinking like the designer you want to be—and here’s how, in 6 steps.

1. Constantly refine your taste

Like we talked about last week, good taste is honed over time. And refining that taste as you move forward in your career is crucial. This means actively curating great insights and strong design artifacts. Whether you’re adding Nitish Khagwal’s interactions to your swipe file or reading Rauno Frieberg’s latest on design, these little points of reference will inform your judgment.

Some helpful tips as you go:

• Add high-quality design examples to your swipe files, including interactions, UI patterns, and visual styles that resonate with you
• Follow design influencers and experts on platforms like Dribbble, Behance, and LinkedIn…and then analyze what makes their designs effective
• Participate in design critique sessions to broaden your perspective on what constitutes good design

2. Make impact your north star

If you’re angling for a senior designer role, you’re probably pretty confident in your skills and craft. So now, you have to start thinking about the million other things that impact the design process: constraints, risks, advantages, speed vs. accuracy—the factors that help you make informed bets.

As you refine your career strategy, work on making decisions with those factors in mind. That’s how you become someone known for impact.

3. Make room for the uncomfortable

Growth is the outcome of healing through discomfort. So welcome discomfort in your design work…

• Embrace opportunities to exercise new muscles
• Volunteer for projects outside your comfort zone to build new skills
• View mistakes as opportunities for growth rather than setbacks
• Regularly assess your progress and adjust your approach based on lessons learned

Doing all this helps you to know when to be the player, the coach, or both simultaneously. Become a practiced challenger.

4. Be an efficient learner

Efficient learners know where to find the right resources just when they need them. Build out your collection of topic-specific courses, workshops, books, and mentors, and don’t be afraid to lean on those resources when you have specific and solvable questions.

5. Know how to communicate influence

Senior designers are skilled communicators. Think about your own experience on design teams: Immature designers often focus on getting credit for the best idea, while strong designers focus on translating the ideas already present, right?

Being indispensable as a design leader requires you to be laser focused on clarity. It’s your job to parse through complex ideas and keep your team both 1) aligned and 2) creative. Here are some pointers for nailing comms:

• State the project’s intent early and often to keep conversations on track
• Measure the distance between reality and intent by communicating a long-term vision with incremental steps
• Use a good sense-making toolbox that includes tools like Figma, Venn diagrams, flow charts, mind maps, decision matrices, and lists to make sense of information

6. Deeply understand the business realities

Balancing idealism with pragmatism within the strategic framework of your company is key to success. Knowing economic fundamentals, like network effects or economies of scale, helps you support your company’s big bets. But most designers don’t know what bets their company is placing (I went deep on this at Config).

So what else can you learn about business to become a senior designer?

• Learn how companies make and lose money
• Understand key business metrics and KPIs
• Tie your work directly to business outcomes
• Speak the language of CEOs, not just designers

Bonus: Airbnb’s Ryan Scott runs a great cohort teaching designers to describe the ROI of design.

Bottom line: Seniority has nothing to do with years. It's about the degree to which you can drive meaningful change. Practicing these 6 skills with impact in mind will get you where you want to go—I guarantee it.

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News, Tools, and Resources: The Path to Promotion

• I’m a big fan of Brian Lovin’s interviews on design leveling.
• Figma’s Product Design Ladder is a great resource for understanding what success should look like at every career level. Intercom’s Product Design Job Levels is another great one.
• How to create a career plan that gets you to the next level, c/o Aaron James.
• Great read: The Path to Senior Product Designer: An Actionable Growth Plan for a UX Design Career by Artiom Dashinsky.
• Love research? Here’s a career framework for UXR.
• This is a great roadmap of disciplines in product design.

Got a great tool, podcast episode, idea, or something else? Hit reply and tell me what’s up.

Top Courses to Stay On Your A-Game

I always do my best to be a lifelong learner. That’s why I love courses so much. These are the top picks I’m excited to take right now to keep the rust off:

• ​Framer Zero to Hero by Tim Gabe
• ​UI Engineering 101 for Designers by design leadership at Clerk​
• ​Staff Designer: Influence & Lead as an Individual Contributor by Catt Small
• ​Interactive Animation with Rive by Jeff McAvoy

The UX Tools Job Board

• Chime is looking for a Director of Product Design in San Francisco.
• Zocdoc needs a remote Principal Product Designer for Design Systems.
• Whatnot is hiring a Product Designer, Seller Experience in several locations.

Hiring for a design role, or know someone who is? Submit it here to hit the inboxes of 75k+ talented designers.

Thanks for reading! What are you currently doing to level up? Hit reply and let me know. See you next week!

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