Val Head: CREATING YOUR OWN DESIGN CAREER PATH | SIC 2024

Leading a team isn’t the only way to be a design leader. Being a top-level individual contributor makes you a design leader too, but there are far fewer resources out there about this path.

Choosing the individual contributor career path as a designer comes with a lot of questions: How do you have leadership impact without formal authority over a team? And how do you manage your own career path staying on the IC ladder? In this talk Val will share her take on leading as a Principal Designer, plus what worked and what didn’t in her own experience navigating the individual contributor career path. (Hint – it’s not about being the loudest person in the room.) She’ll also share insights on what effective senior individual contributor design leadership looks like from the Principal Designer handbook project created for Adobe Design.

You’ll leave with a better sense of what it takes to lead without being a manager and how to embrace the adventure of creating a career path that’s unique to you.

1. Creating your
own design
career path
Val Head • Principal Designer, Adobe
Seattle Interactive 2024

3. Leading without formal authority

4. Leadership is always part of the job

5. Embrace it to
strengthen your
leadership presence
Ignore it and risk
diminishing your
leadership influence
or

6. Individual Contributor (IC)
A designer, on any level of the career ladder, who is not
required to have direct reports.
Principal Designer
The job title given to the top rung of the IC career ladder.
Typically equivalent to the Director or Senior Director level
on the management career ladder.
Two useful
definitions:
(Your company might have different names for these things, but these are the terms I’ll be using today.)

7. Foundations
of leading
without
formal
authority
Carve out your specialty space • Build trust and connections

8. Carve out your speciality space

9. •Establishes your expertise in a crucial area
•Acts as a foundation for a broader internal
audience for your work
•Attracts collaborators and establishes
potential common ground
What a
speciality space
does for you:
Leading without formal authority

10. Imagine you were going to hold open office hours for the
community or internally at your work:
1. What topics would you be most excited for
people to come talk to you about?
2. What would you want to keep talking about
for hours?
3. Of those things, which are both exciting to
you and relevant to your company/product goals?
An exercise to find
your specialty space

11. Your area of specialty helps you define what success
means to you.
Leading without formal authority

12. Build Trust & Connections

13. Technically, no one has to listen to you…
(But that doesn’t mean no one will!)
Leading without formal authority

14. •Avoid imposing big solutions out of the blue
•Believe in the collective expertise of your team
•Be transparent about what you’re trying to achieve
Building trust
takes time
Leading without formal authority

15. •Start projects with workshops and listening
tours
•Get input from contributors early on and keep
them informed
•Credit collaborators meaningfully
Some examples
of what building
trust looks like
Leading without formal authority

16. Being good to work with means addressing problems
and difficult topics constructively
Leading without formal authority

17. Building skills
for IC
leadership
The Principal Designer archetypes

18. Thought leader/Visionary
Coming up with new future-looking ideas
and looking ahead to where current
industry trends are heading.
Evangelist
Exhibiting the confidence and prowess to
get your work attention to a wide internal
audience, and/or promoting a specific idea,
product, or feature to external audiences.
Researcher
Forming hypotheses, gathering data, and
participating in research efforts for new
ideas or products.
Entrepreneur/Innovator
Presenting a solution or strategy for a net
new business idea or product based on
industry trends or gaps in the market.
Strategist
Orchestrating plans to execute on a new
initiative or product.
Subject Matter Expert
Being the go-to person for answers and
opinions in a specific knowledge area.
Principal Designer Archetypes

19. Principal Designer Archetypes

20. “As a Principal Designer, how strongly do you identify
with each archetype in your work on a scale of 1 to 10?”
Principal Designer Archetypes

21. Principal Designer Archetypes
Individual Principal Designers shape the role differently

22. Principal Designer
Archetypes
self-assessment
exercise
How strongly do you identify with each archetype in your work
on a scale of 1 to 10?”

23. Climbing
the IC
career
ladder
Track your impact • Connect outside of your bubble

24. Climbing the IC career ladder

25. Track your impact

26. Business impact, not just design impact
Climbing the IC career ladder

27. •What topics are top of mind for the top
leaders of your company?
•Is what you’re working on connected to
those topics?
What kind of
impact does
your work have?
Climbing the IC career ladder

28. What you’re
working on
What’s most important
to company leadership
Climbing the IC career ladder

29. 1. Make a list of things your company leaders mention
as top goals or top concerns.
2. Make a list of your current projects and their
expected outcomes.
3. Can you directly connect what you’re working on to
those goals or concerns?
An exercise to
assess your impact

30. Connect outside of your bubble

31. •Find opportunities for unique solutions or
collaborations. Seek out the common
problems internally, or the external trends that
are valuable.
•Conduct relationship experiments
•Follow the momentum
Use your unique
vantage point
Climbing the IC career ladder

32. Taking ownership of your career path means moving forward with intention.
Define what career success means to you.
Create your own design career path

33. Thank you!