Breaking the glass ceiling of design

Designers are a well-intentioned people, but often disadvantaged within a business setting.

If you find yourself stuck in a design practitioner role, or not advancing beyond a purely design management position, then you’ve reached this glass ceiling.

For the sake of yourself and countless other designers in this industry, you should aim to break it.

Why designers get stuck

There are two main reasons:

1. Designers are held back by collaboration issues
2. The comfort zone quashes ambition

Collaboration issues

Whether we realise it or not, all software projects are run with a process that can be described using the Double Diamond.

At Life Moments we have a fairly complex flow diagram to visualise each step we take towards launching a new product. It’s not a process that can be understood at a glance.

We can simplify its structure by identifying which activities are working towards each of the four stages in the Double Diamond approach:

• Discover & Define (the strategic stages)
• Develop & Deliver (the execution stages)

Design courses teach students that they should be working along the full length of this process in order to deliver the right thing, designed in the right way.

It takes a fairly progressive business to empower designers to truly take responsibility for such a broad range of activities.

Typically what happens is that the bulk of designers workload is found in one stage: develop.

Why?

Because nobody else in the business can do the visual design work.

They’ve not spent the thousands of hours drawing and understanding UI systems. And so the weight of that responsibility tends to remain entirely with design teams, leaving less time to spend on other aspects of the design process.

Meanwhile, Product Managers, Senior Managers, Marketers, Business Analysts (and many more roles) get busy taking on the discovery research, running strategy workshops, making decisions about what the rough outline of the product should be - essentially taking control of product development strategy.

Designers might be involved here, but they’re very rarely owning it.

At the other end of the double diamond we see Software Developers, Engineering Managers, Project Managers, Agile Coaches, QA Engineers (and many more roles) taking on the actual build of the product.

Designers are involved here largely to check whether the layouts look close enough to their mockups.

The result is that designers tend to be squeezed into a narrow role of conducting design research and creating mockups.

They’re typically treated as junior members of a product team, and not given the agency to grow beyond.

The comfort zone

The magic you’re looking for is in the work you’re avoiding – Dipen Parmar

As well as the influence of collaboration, the breadth of designers careers is also heavily impacted by their own psychology and behaviour.

It’s difficult to accept when user research suggests your ideas or hypotheses are wrong.

If you’re proud and refuse to believe the evidence presented, then it’s difficult to progress your product design.

Likewise, this shows a lack of growth mindset, which makes it difficult to progress your skills, and therefore your career.

Design schools teach their students to be humble in order to discover the truth about products and their users.

Progressive businesses also encourage their product teams to ‘fail fast’ and that any failure is an opportunity to learn.

With a growth mindset designers can set themselves on the path to roles beyond the Develop stage of the Double Diamond. Into roles that will enable them to break that glass ceiling.

It takes ambition to make that gear shift. And perhaps more ambition than expected as another challenge lays in wait for those who make it this far… impostor syndrome.

New roles present unfamiliar challenges and new expectations from colleagues.

We’ve all felt like we’re out of our depth at some points in our career. Some say fake it till you make it, but that can be a risky approach. And we feel it at the time – it’s stressful.

Fake it if you must, but a similar and far more relaxing approach is to simply dig into learning about the new role and be honest with your colleagues about your journey.

The good guys will help you elevate. The bad guys will expose their true colours, making them easy to ignore.

These three factors – pride, humility, and impostor syndrome – combine to reign in ambition and form a comfort zone around your familiar and unique design skills.

My thoughts, in hindsight

I’ve experienced, first-hand, the frustration of being treated as an artworking monkey despite my knowledge and skills in functions outside of design.

I’m guilty of leading, yet failing to market myself within an organisation, as a leader.

One reason my outlook changed was due to what I learnt about business from running ecommerce shops during the pandemic.

Greater knowledge improved my ability to contribute in new areas.

Things you can do to win over collaboration issues:

• Look beyond design to see how a business runs and you’ll understand how the design function truly fits in.
• When your manager is on annual leave, offer to take on those leadership activities.

As for any internal struggles you may have, I would advise designers to do whatever you can to chip away at the edge of your comfort zone

• Recognise when pride wells up, and remember that it precedes a fall
• Be humble, but not so humble as to avoid imagining yourself as a leader
• Remember that you’re only an impostor if you’re not honest about yourself

Most importantly, make a change to the way you’re operating today because, as Dipen Parmar said, “The magic you’re looking for is in the work you’re avoiding”.