By Marissa Louie · 3 min read

Without having a clear growth path, it's hard to manage one's design career as effectively as possible.

Yet the frameworks behind the individual contributor and manager tracks are often non-existent at early stage startups, and not released to the public by large companies. To address this, Peter Merholz created a valuable framework for assessing designer levels, which has been adopted by several of my peers who are design managers and executives. Peter's original content is here.

I reformatted this framework in a trimmed down, visually organized way that is optimized for widescreen presentation slides in Keynote, PowerPoint, and Google Slides.

Here's my take on the Designer Levels framework, which I have checked against my past experience from my earliest design experience up to being a Principal Designer at Yahoo. It primarily focuses on individual contributors and scales from Junior Designer up to VP of Design:

I also adapted the framework for Design Management Levels, which I have checked against my experience as a Design Manager and Executive at multiple tech startups and at Animoodles:

I’ve found this framework valuable for seeing where I can work with my managers, mentors, coaches, and peers to grow my career. It also helps me evaluate the levels of the designers I work with, and where I can help them grow. More on that in my next post.