A couple years ago I decided to give up my potential in the management track and move back to a role as an individual contributor. However this path was not so obvious to me at the time, and the industry offered little to reinforce my ideas. Public leaders of design and UX (writers, speakers at conferences) were almost universally managers or consultants. I know the senior individual contributors (ICs) existed in technology companies, but they were not very visible in the industry.

In the UX professions, the standard track for leadership is to go into management: Lead the team by being a player-coach, then eventually just coach. Tracks for managers seem to be fairly universal, in that management is a long-studied profession and tends to have a lot of similarities across disciplines.

My opportunity for management came late in my time in a startup as a Sr. Designer. I had been at the company through its founding moments, understanding the technology deeply, and able to extend our ideas far into the future. My fingerprints were everywhere across the product. So when my Design Director sensed our company was headed for acquisition and decided to leave, I was a natural choice to succeed him. We had been through a lot together, and he had helped turn my career around when I was mentally stuck. While it felt natural, him recommending that I step into his shoes is something for which I am forever grateful, and didn’t take for granted.

Why did I take it? To lead of course, to step up, to take what I know and make sure it scales to help others on the team. I knew enough then to be the stabilizing force to advocate for design at the company. I thought that by wrapping my arms around all of the team, I could help stitch things together and make things all make sense. I had tried the mantle of manager long ago in college, in residential life as an ‘RA.’ But this was different and there were no training wheels this time.

It was a smaller group I managed at first, but there were a couple initial challenges right off the bat. Having previously been a peer on the team, I had to win their respect in a way I had not before. I had to spend a lot more time communicating. I had to step into the organization leadership meetings and all the administration and policy related stuff that comes with it. And even though we were a small group, we had research as an independent discipline, which I had always helped with in the past, but needing to advocate for research provided a strategic challenge.

On top of this a few months in, a couple major things happened: my daughter was born and we found out we were being acquired. Chaos on both fronts, but we pushed through. I cam back early from leave (deferring to later) and dove deep on the new company as best as I could to help us integrate. I’ve since read Margaret Wheatley’s Who Do We Choose To Be. She describes that leadership in uncertain times needs to be a stabilizing force, and I like to think I tried to take that head on.

Even so, the anxiety of the unknown was palpable on my team. A new vastly larger company, a new design language to adopt, and entirely new product space to learn about. One designer decided not to stick around, favoring the small company experience. I don’t blame her at all, and respect her deeply for her decision, but it still hurt as a rejection.

We had many other challenges in starting anew within Workday, but I probably can’t describe them here. I had to wade through policy and process changes, numerous recruiting challenges, all while holding down the fort as a lead designer. It felt up to me to help address the core challenges of integrating our products at the time, as we had to put part of the product on ice and the other part we had to redesign in a year. I was often torn between creative direction and supporting my team. Specifically, how do I shelter the team from the chaos but still enable them to learn what they need so they can thrive in our new world? I never found that balance, and as the team almost tripled in size and adopted another

I’m proud of the work I did managing the team: keeping the team stable; finding really great team members to bring in complementary skills and add culture-add, many of whom are still thriving on our team today; delivering a very successful product; earning us a seat at the table for research and design to continue to grow their presence.

However, I was stressed beyond belief and struggled to be patient with my team and their struggles. I expected a lot from them. And I struggled to influence across my peer group to try to influence the presence of design in our teams - I was so used to my actions speaking for themselves, it took a lot more mental strain to try to set up others for success and crafting the slow and meticulous communication cycles to move things through the org. And more and more the minutiae of running the organization were not interesting to me. I didn’t like crafting messaging to my team to talk about company policy, I didn’t like setting organization goals at an executive table, and I didn’t like solving personnel problems when I could be solving product ones.

I was starting to think I couldn’t really hold it together. I realized though there was another path and I just didn’t know how to take it. My manager was understanding and supportive, though he appropriately cast doubt on my decision: managers are glorified more than ICs, enjoy a higher pay range (especially bonuses), and the ceiling is theoretically higher as there are many org levels to get promoted through. As a manager, you’re invited to the key meetings and become the public face of your team’s efforts. It’s frankly easier to wrap your mind around growth as a manager: what success and growth looks like, what you have to do, what you can focus on. The certainty and assurance of my career path as a manager was a lot to give up.

I was a business major in college, can speak business, and know how the business works. I learned for a second time in my life how little I want to be involved directly in business aspects of the organization. Now, I know there is no escaping it in the long term, I would have a chance to get some distance for time being.

It took a lot to realize it and make the steps, but I made my decision. The reasons in retrospect feels obvious, but it took some analysis to get there, to decide what I really wanted.

• I knew I wanted to stay involved in the work. I love thinking about strategy and high-level product concepts. This is where my strengths are naturally. Giving that up didn’t feel right.
• The way I wanted to grow leaned more technical: how to grapple with complexity, improve our process, and integrate effectively to deliver software.
• The pressure of being ‘always on’ was more than I wanted to deal with, and I wanted a break. I didn’t want to have to balance my leadership with my relationship to my team.
• I knew I was going to have a hard time keeping my vision out of the picture. I knew that a good leader needed to be selfless and focus on helping others achieve their potential, but my own path was still emerging.
• I spent more time than I liked coaching team members on professionalism, expectations, and coping with the challenges of working in UX at a large company.

It helped to be candid with my manager, but the transition was not immediate, and in fact quite prolonged. The hiring process for replacement took a very long time, almost a year. It just took a really long time to find the right person. Much of that time my team didn’t know I was planning to step down, and before I had a chance to share the decision. Bumps in the road aside, I was hopeful for a fresh start. I had hired my previous director, and now I got to hire my replacement. It felt good to do this though, and I think hiring the right person was critical for getting me the support I needed to thrive on my new uncharted path.

Even when hired, the transition was not immediate though. Despite being on a small team I struggled to delegate as much as I should have and still retained a number of core leadership responsibilities. I utilized some ideas in Merholz-Skinner’s Org Design for Design Orgs, to suggest we break our responsibilities across People, Process, and Craft. I took Craft, he took People, and we shared Process. It was a bumpy start to the transition, and we’re still refining how leadership supports the group, but the distinction has held up well and played to our respective strengths.

Even though the transition has been difficult, fuzzy, and prolonged, but ultimately still feels like the right one. I tried not to be hard on myself but despite my success as a manager, but I knew I had failed in some respects. I think I already knew a lot instinctively about leadership but didn’t have the environment or experience to put it into practice effectively with all the other things I was trying to do. I realized, most importantly, that in many ways I never gave up IC work. Maybe it was all just me delaying my choice until far past the point where it was sustainable.

A friend once recommended I could have been happier and more successful with a more experienced and hardened team, or perhaps I needed more direct support from my own leaders. That is possible, and I may consider another go at it in the future. But Until then, I’m happy with the chance to spread my wings, create, and enjoy a chance to do more things that feel more like me.

This was the right decision for me at the time. And I don’t know how clear my path will get or how successful I’ll be, but I look forward to the challenge.

In my time now as a post-management IC, I’ve already had a chance to reflect on some key developments in how my career is shaping up.

• This was the right move for me and the team. I think we have all thrived under the new structure and leadership and are moving in a positive direction. I gave management a good go of it (almost 2 years) but I like my new direction a lot better.
• From my time in a startup, I learned more than I imagined from the deep collaboration with backend architects, specifically the ones in data processing. They taught me to think incredibly critically and with foresight. I realize now that though they were a different discipline, my role is quite similar to theirs in many respects.
• My newer IC role has a lot of overlap as well with senior ICs in product management as well. I could have imagined my same role evolving from a contributor track in PM just as easily (and I had considered the switch many times when I was an IC)
• Despite the overlap, there is still something very uniquely ‘Design’ about my approach to the role, as a connector of ideas trying to manage a coherent vision that distills otherwise disparate ideas together.
• Few in industry have a clear expectation of what a Senior Design IC does, when to call them in or when not too. I’ve since spent a lot of time thinking about my role and have needed to start defining it more formally.
• These same ambiguities of senior IC work can be found in technical tracks, meaning there’s not a lot to model from and there is still a lot of ways my path can be unique to me. But I also think I can learn a lot from where other disciplines in the industry are going.