Over 6 years ago I made the decision to follow the manager path. I’d been working as a user experience designer by day while teaching UX a few times per week in the evenings at BrainStation for a couple of semesters and had discovered a passion for helping others grow and develop their skills. At that time, however, my day job was at an amazing but small digital agency. My team was all quite senior, which provided an environment with little capacity for more directed career development beyond what occurred naturally during project work. This realization is what led me to seek a role at a growing company that prioritized career development.

Fast forward to today: I’ve been working at a growth stage company for five years and have been a manager for the last four. I’ve learned and developed so much as we grew the team from 5 up to 29 product designers and researchers. But something has felt off for me in the last year, and not just because of the global pandemic (although that’s had an impact I’m sure). Something felt like it was missing… I needed to make a change.

Eventually after several conversations, many evenings of self-reflection, and a lot of writing, I realized the change I needed was to transition to an individual contributor (IC) role. It took me a while to get there and to become comfortable with the idea, which is part of why I’m writing this post. I’m hopeful that sharing my journey and what I learned along the way will help others trying to decide which path to take. Whether you’re deciding to move away from or into people management or you want to create some comfort in the path you’re already on, hopefully, this will give you the tool to make the decision (hopefully faster than it took me!)

Something felt off

I first became aware that something was off in December 2020 when I did my annual self-review and goal-setting exercise. I’ve been doing this exercise every year for the last 5 years with good results (here’s a post about my process if you’re curious). The results this time felt a bit hollow. I was going through the motions instead of gleaning new insights. As I tried to understand why I identified a couple of things:

1. I was missing a lot of the passion I used to have for the job.
2. I was suffering from exhaustion that never abated aka burnout.

The underlying causes were unclear, but what was clear was that I needed to diagnose whatever it was and necessarily make a change to my role, where I worked, something…

Taking stock of what’s working and what’s not

My next step was to talk to a performance coach and my people business partner at work. They gave me a bit of perspective and encouraged me to run a retrospective on my role (I decided to make up a variant of the 4 Ls: liked, disliked, longed for, and challenged by). Through these conversations and the retrospective, I identified a number of things:

• I confirmed that I was was indeed experiencing burnout.
• I was missing joint ownership of a problem space and the collaboration that comes with it, which is a core competency and need for any product designer.
• I was constantly unable to find the time or focus I needed to perform at my best since 1) part of a manager’s job is to be constantly interrupted, and 2) I covered 4–5 major yet unassociated problem spaces. This was also directly at odds with one of my core strengths: “Focus” (at least according to the Gallup CliftonStrengths test my team had recently completed).
• I’ve been a package of bandaids: I was consistently being what the company/team needed me to be and do, but not looking out for what I needed. Oddly enough, this is a common trait of people with the “Developer” strength which is my #1 strength: “You enjoy being generous with your time, knowledge, skills, experiences, resources, or possessions. Naturally inclined to make sacrifices that benefit someone else.”

Identifying my blindspots

Armed with this outside confirmation and perspective, I decided it was time to talk to my manager and share what I had found. I anxiously dreaded this conversation because of what my discoveries likely meant for me and the impact it would have on her and our team. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

She was very understanding about the entire situation and completely agreed with everything I brought forward. She also identified a major blindspot: much of my time as a manager hadn’t been in “ideal” circumstances. Early on I was a player-coach (both managing other designers while trying to support 1–2 teams as an IC). Then I moved to another part of the product where I was a pure manager but was covering more disparate and disconnected problem spaces than a manager should be covering. For much of that time I was also missing a strong PM partner to collaborate with. And I had a prolonged period of time without a design leader to learn from.

Getting outside perspectives

My manager encouraged me to continue exploring and identify other blindspots. She also helped me seek out perspectives from outside of our company (where I’d been insulated for several years) by connecting me with three managers from different companies where Product Design Management was better established. She intentionally connected me with people who would give me different perspectives; one is a career manager at HashiCorp, another is a manager who recently returned to an IC role at HubSpot, and the last is a manager turned IC then turned back into a manager at Etsy. Here’s what I learned from those conversations:

• Take stock of all of the activities you’re responsible for and identify which ones give you energy VS which are energy sinks. Now which of those align with the people manager path, the IC path, or both?
• You can still be good at your job and even grow if you’re not passionate, it will just be painful and will take a long time to progress. Conversely, the growth and happiness curve of someone who loves their job is exponentially better.
• Leadership is not the exclusive domain of managers. It’s not a role or an authority granted to you. It’s an energy and influence born of loving what you do minute to minute regardless of your title.
• The presumed stigma of “moving back to an IC role” is non-existent. Quite the opposite actually. Everyone will understand and be happy for you.
• Just because you shift back to being an IC, it doesn’t mean the door is closed on people management forever. The best leaders in the world are often those who do both with some frequency: The best managers come from within the organization because you get razor-sharp skills from the people who just built the thing and they have deep knowledge and credibility; The best ICs are people who’ve spent time in management, not because they’re the best at a specific skill, but because they know how to get shit done, navigate conflict, and influence others.

Pulling it all together

Coming out of those conversations, I returned to my retro board and used two new lenses:

1. Identify the activities that give me energy VS drain energy
2. Recategorize by activities that are strictly people management (headcount, recruitment, career conversations, tooling, etc) VS strictly high-level IC activities (research, prototyping, IA, etc) VS both (design strategy, concepting, writing, facilitation, mentorship, etc).

The outcome was clear: I get a lot of energy from the activities that overlap both manager and IC roles, but my biggest energy drain comes from the more administrative tasks of people management. My decision was made: I needed to transition to being an individual contributor.

At least for now…

Since making the decision in January it took us nearly a year to find a manager to fill my role. In that time I got to experience something closer to equilibrium as a manager in a far more “ideal” state (pure manager, fewer problem spaces, a collaborative PM partner, a strong design leader to learn from). The last 9 months have been my best as a manager and because of that do see myself penduluming back one day, but for now, I’m sticking with my original plan to focus on the work, sharpening my design skills, and leading as an individual contributor.

Closing thoughts

I’ve now successfully made the transition to a Staff Product Designer role. It felt like I had been carrying around a great weight on my shoulders that’s just disappeared. It’s definitely been the right decision for what I needed right now in my career and for my mental health.

In case you skimmed, here are my lessons learned:

• Trust your gut. If something feels off, it probably is. This is true in most facets of work and life.
• Listen to your instincts, but get a second opinion (and a third, and a fourth, …). When trying to diagnose the cause, get outside perspectives from a variety of sources and points of view. Don’t just rely on those closest to you either, look outside of your inner circle and where you work. Try to get the viewpoints of people who have been in the same place you are right now but have taken different paths.
• Figure out what gives you energy and what drains it. This was extremely illuminating for me. Do what you need to increase one and decrease the other.
• Do what you have to to take care of yourself and get what you need.
• Collaboration is a need not a want for designers to be happy (most roles really). If that’s missing, either demand it or go out and find it.
• The growth and happiness curve of someone who loves their job is exponential.
• The only stigma of “moving back to an IC role” comes from yourself. Everyone else will applaud you (and some may even be inspired).
• Just because you shift back to being an IC, it doesn’t mean the door is closed on people management forever. The best leaders in the world are often the ones who do both with some frequency.
• What’s right for you right now, isn’t necessarily going to be what’s right for you a year from now. It’s important to check in with yourself on a regular cadence and not just follow the path simply because it’s the one you laid out for yourself.

Big thanks to those that helped me find my way: Maria Pereda, Katie Koleszar, Katie Wyka, Jess Dale, Dmitry Nekraovski, and Jonathan Meharry.

And finally, some resources that helped me:

• There and back again talk by Russ Maschmeyer (Leading Design 2017)
• The engineer/manager pendulum article by mipsytipsy
• This collection of interviews with staff designers is meant to help others navigate the individual contributor career path