I recently found an old performance review packet I drafted years ago when I held a design management role. It covered five designers on my team, and ran a dozen pages. This was back pre-AI, when you actually needed to type this stuff out. Think it through. Much of the document had nothing to do with ‘rating’ anyone.
I had a section for each person called Potential, broken into problem solving, relationships, motivation, learning, leadership. There are notes to myself about which conversations would be hard and why. For one designer, brilliant at the craft, the file tracks a slow withdrawal: skipped meetings, defensiveness when asked for updates, a spiral I was trying to interrupt before it set. For another, the question wasn’t performance at all. She was outgrowing us. I was figuring out what would have to be true for her to stay, and how to help her leave well if needed.
Aside from the diplomacy, planning, visioning, and operational tasks, that leadership role was really about showing up differently for each person, differently month to month. The designer in the spiral needed directness, someone willing to name what was happening before it hardened. The one outgrowing us needed a coach. Someone else needed to see what the quality bar looked like and have the pace set for them; another needed me to get out of the way entirely. Reading which mode a person needs, and when, and how to switch without whiplash, is a skill. It took me years, my own coaching, and more than a few bad calls to build. The infrastructure underneath it was unremarkable: weekly 1:1s that were never just status updates, crits where half-formed work didn’t cost you anything later, prompting peers for feedback, providing praise in public, correction in private, enough trust banked that a tough conversation in March didn’t come out of nowhere.
I don’t think this work has disappeared so much as gone unstaffed. Design leadership roles are being cut across the industry, and the designers who remain are expected to operate as independent builders. Faster, leaner, and largely alone. The tooling makes the building part genuinely easier. Nothing about it makes it easier to grow as a professional, or a person.
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I saw this coming a few years ago and stepped out of leadership, back into an IC role. This was partly aligned with wanting to build my own startup again and reconnect with the energy of making vs leading, but could also see which way the winds were blowing.
Those hard-won leadership skills are a superpower as an IC. Setting your own schedule and broadcasting it effectively. Clearly defining the ‘why’, and writing 1-pagers for alignment. Reading a room before a review. Seeding a strategic thought to a leader so they’re the one carrying it. Knowing when a PM needs a director and when they need a coach. Sensing that the junior engineer’s silence in crit isn’t agreement. I’m a more effective designer for the years I spent learning how projects run, how businesses operate, and how people grow, and stall, and leave.
I earned those management skills the only way anyone gets them, by leading, with increasingly senior people checking my work. The ICs coming up now will be asked to influence, align, and mentor without ever holding a role where those muscles get trained. The whole management track is evaporating.
Douglas McGregor saw the underlying choice way back in 1960, in The Human Side of Enterprise. A company either assumes its people need to be directed and controlled, or it assumes they’re already motivated and its job is to clear the way. He was precise about what a manager can and cannot give: management can’t hand anyone self-respect or growth, but “it can create conditions such that he is encouraged and enabled to seek such satisfactions for himself, or it can thwart him by failing to create those conditions.”
That’s gardening logic. Pulling on a plant gets you nothing. The work is soil, light, and water, done consistently and mostly invisibly. The growing happens on the plant’s own schedule. 1:1s, crits, coffee walks, games nights, and private Slack GIF exchanges were the soil. The tooling everyone’s excited about is a faster hammer.
Looking ahead along the hype cycle curve, I imagine nothing much will happen for a year or two. New tools and workflows will keep emerging, orgs will keep shrinking OpEx and getting leaner, and velocity won’t drop. Then mid-level designers will stall without knowing why, the strong ones will drift out the door, and the ones who were quietly struggling will just get quieter. When you’re a Sr, you’ll no longer have the option of exploring management or staying on the technical track. Maybe we’ll all pivot to a Product title. By the time it shows up in the numbers, the people who knew how to fix it will be gone too.
People remember who built their path, and orgs that develop people attract people worth developing. Developing people was always slow, unglamorous, and hard to measure. That made it easy to mistake for waste.
