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<aside> 💬 This is a hot topic of conversations that comes up for every designer as they progress through their career, I can’t tell you which one you should choose, but I’ll share my story in hopes you’ll find it useful.

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Let me give you a few bullet points of how I ended up as manager:

My background is in Computer Science, but I always liked messing around in Photoshop to create forum signatures back in the day, but I don’t think I’m particularly strong visual designer. As I worked with other designers in my career it was very clear I should leave the visual design aspect to other folks.
I got the opportunity to be a teacher’s assistance (TA) in undergrad school in my sophomore and junior year; I liked the relationship you have with students as a TA, you’re a colleague and you don’t have the same responsibilities as the teacher you’re there to help them along.
I was designer # 2 at my first job in UX, when you’re in that situation you’re going to wear a lot of hats, and as the team grew I realized I could add the most value by facilitating conversations between product, engineering and design

One of my favorite things as a manager is when I’m discussing a project with one of my reports, and I suddenly come up with a possible design solution, they’ll take it back to their Figma board and they come up with something that’s 10x better than whatever I was thinking about. Part of my working on this project is helping out folks make connections between disciplines and teams that will help them find those 10x better ideas.

If any of this resonates with you and you want to have a chat about manager vs IC feel free to get in touch.

It’s been a few years since I was an individual contributor (IC) so I have fewer resources for folks who choose that path. But Staff.design have put together a great resource.

Staff.design

Staff Design

DS 1