Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Designing and Driving UX Careers
Gold
Wednesday, June 8, 2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Share the love for this talk
Designing and Driving UX Careers
Speakers: Ian Swinson
Link:

Summary

Ian recounts his experience starting as the first UX person at Salesforce and managing increasingly complex, diverse teams. He highlights the challenge of aligning managers Adam and Karen’s teams on performance and promotions, which exposed a lack of shared language and clarity. Struggling with one-on-ones and team anxiety, Ian researched his team’s career concerns and realized many felt pressured by linear career ladders emphasizing management tracks. Ian advocates for treating careers as design projects with flexible, jungle-gym-style paths, emphasizing individual needs rather than prescribed steps. He developed a framework capturing core and additive skills across design, research, communication, leadership, culture, and innovation—recognizing that leadership isn’t about managing but mentoring and influencing. Ian created a collaborative workshop to help individuals and teams reflect on their brand, set actionable goals, and develop a network of mentors across business and technical domains. His approach standardizes language, reduces promotion debates, improves one-on-ones, and empowers both managers and employees to proactively design their career trajectories.

Key Insights

  • Career ladders are linear and imposed, but real careers should be designed as flexible, non-linear 'jungle gyms'.

  • Managers evaluated their large teams completely differently, revealing a need for a shared assessment framework.

  • Many technical contributors resist management paths but can still grow significantly as individual contributors with leadership in mentoring and culture.

  • Effective one-on-ones need structure to provide consistent value regardless of manager's daily energy.

  • Knowing your product and competitive landscape deeply is a core and sometimes overlooked UX skill.

  • Communication skills, even basics like error-free emails, strongly affect credibility at executive levels.

  • Leadership is about influence, mentorship, and culture-building, not just formal management roles.

  • Innovation requires a fearless mindset willing to break rules and challenge existing processes.

  • Personal branding shapes how stakeholders perceive you when you're not in the room and needs active reflection and adjustment.

  • Workshops that bring diverse experience levels together promote learning, cohesion, and create a common language for career development.

Notable Quotes

"Careers as ladders, which is how HR wants it to be because it fits financial models, but careers aren’t linear—they’re jungle gyms."

"Why don’t we do what we do for our careers? Designers should design their own career as a project."

"Leadership does not mean standing in front of a room. It means mentoring, influencing, and helping others grow."

"If you’re amazing at your job but nobody listens or acts on your work, what’s the impact really?"

"People care so much about titles, but honestly, I’d prefer the star-bellied sneak on the business card."

"A good one-on-one needs some framework so that even if I'm tired or burned out, I can still provide value."

"Knowing your customer and your product inside and out is a given—you can’t design well without that knowledge."

"Communication is mundane but key: sending an email full of mistakes to an executive changes their entire impression of you."

"Innovation is about being fearless. There’s a rule or a process, but that doesn’t mean it’s right—keep pushing and breaking things."

"Your career is the only design project you will ever own, so own it consciously and actively."

Ask the Rosenbot
Sam Proulx
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Russ Unger
Onboarding: The Ecosystem, not the Afterthought
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks Day 1
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Prayag Narula
HCI 2.0: Humanity Deserves the Attention that UX Research has to Offer
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Alexis Lucio
Scaling Accessibility Through Design Systems
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Shipra Kayan
How we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Amy Paris
Delivering Equity: Government Services for All Ages, Languages, Sexual Orientations, and Gender Identities
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Marc Majers
Interrupted UX - Add A Dose of Reality To Usability Testing
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Marisa Bernstein
It Takes GRIT: Lessons from the Small, but Mighty World of Civic Usability Testing
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Nathan Curtis
Design Systems for Us: How Many One-Source(s)-of-Truth Are Enough? (Videoconference)
2019 • DesignOps Community
Jon Fukuda
Theme One Intro
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Paula Bach
Improving Legacy Software: How Much Better Does it Have to Be?
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Kayla Farrell
What It's Like To Be a User Researcher at Compass
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Catt Small
Moving from Execution to Strategy as a Designer
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Phil Gilbert
A Consistent Culture of Design
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold

More Videos

"If design didn’t move the needle, we wouldn’t be having this conversation."

Standardizing Product Merits for Leaders, Designers, and Everyone

June 15, 2018

Simon Wardley

"The Red Queen effect means if others adapt, you must adapt or lose."

Simon Wardley

Maps and Topographical Intelligence (Videoconference)

January 31, 2019

Sandra Camacho

"Designing for the dominant default ignores people whose identities are marginalized or excluded."

Sandra Camacho

Creating More Bias-Proof Designs

January 22, 2025

Darian Davis

"When fellow co-workers label an individual as difficult, it’s hard not to treat that person as a problem."

Darian Davis

Lessons from a Toxic Work Relationship

January 8, 2024

Fisayo Osilaja

"After each interview, I input the transcript into ChatGPT and ask for three key takeaways that I can quickly share with stakeholders."

Fisayo Osilaja

[Demo] The AI edge: From researcher to strategist

June 4, 2024

Uday Gajendar

"Craft cultivates customer satisfaction, loyalty, and even forgiveness when functional issues arise."

Uday Gajendar

The Wicked Craft of Enterprise UX

May 13, 2015

Davis Neable

"There is no design team responsible for the overarching experience across the entire company."

Davis Neable Guy Segal

How to Drive a Design Project When you Don’t Have a Design Team

June 10, 2021

Eniola Oluwole

"People felt designs were self-evident and too much explanation was a barrier to using the patterns."

Eniola Oluwole

Lessons From the DesignOps Journey of the World's Largest Travel Site

October 24, 2019

Aurobinda Pradhan

"We believe tracking design metrics aligned to business goals is important to demonstrate design’s impact."

Aurobinda Pradhan Shashank Deshpande

Introduction to Collaborative DesignOps using Cubyts

September 9, 2022