Design (with a capital D) I believe Design requires a holistic grasp of problems, potential, and materials.

If you’re only focused on examining problems, you’re not empowered to dream up the proper solutions.

If you’re only dreaming up what you could do, you’re not close enough to the ground-level truth.

If you’re only working on the nitty gritty implementation, you know about the what but not a lot about the why.

A capital-D Designer is comfortable working organically across all of that, without needing to slice it up into separate little steps and responsibilities.

~Jonas Downey

The Unnecessary Fragmentation of Design Jobs - Signal v. Noise

7 tips to create high functioning design teams (Part 1)

3. Career paths

How do you value and encourage the continued growth of not only managers, but the craftspeople in your teams? You must value the makers, tinkerers, and doers in your team just as much as the people managers. Most traditional career paths have a ceiling, where once you get to a certain level the only way up is to start managing people. But let’s face it, not everyone strives for or wants to do that. Managing people is a craft in and of itself, and it’s not for everyone.

Our career paths have separate tracks for craft and people management (see below).

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