UX And Product Designer’s Career Paths
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As the new year begins, I often find myself in a strange place — reflecting back at the previous year or looking forward to the year ahead. And as I speak with colleagues and friends at the time, it typically doesn’t take long for a conversation about career trajectory to emerge.
So I thought I’d share a few thoughts on how to shape your career path as we are looking ahead to 2026. Hopefully you’ll find it useful.
Run A Retrospective For Last Year
To be honest, for many years, I was mostly reacting. Life was happening to me, rather than me shaping the life that I was living. I was making progress reactively and I was looking out for all kinds of opportunities. It was easy and quite straightforward — I was floating and jumping between projects and calls and making things work as I was going along.
Years ago, my wonderful wife introduced one little annual ritual which changed that dynamic entirely. By the end of each year, we sit with nothing but paper and pencil and run a thorough retrospective of the past year — successes, mistakes, good moments, bad moments, things we loved, and things we wanted to change.
We look back at our memories, projects, and events that stood out that year. And then we take notes for where we stand in terms of personal growth, professional work, and social connections — and how we want to grow.
These are the questions I’m trying to answer there:
- What did I find most rewarding and fulfilling last year?
- What fears and concerns slowed me down the most?
- What could I leave behind, give away or simplify?
- What tasks would be good to delegate or automate?
- What are my 3 priorities to grow this upcoming year?
- What times do I block in my calendar for my priorities?
It probably sounds quite cliche, but these 4–5h of our time every year set a foundation for changes to introduce for the next year. This little exercise shapes the trajectory that I’ll be designing and prioritizing next year. I can’t recommend it enough.
UX Skills Self-Assessment Matrix
Another little tool that I found helpful for professional growth is UX Skills Self-Assessment Matrix (Figma template) by Maigen Thomas. It’s a neat little tool that’s designed to help you understand what you’d like to do more of, what you’d prefer to do less, and where your current learning curve lies vs. where you feel confident in your expertise.
The exercise typically takes around 20–30 minutes, and it helps identify the UX skills with a sweet spot — typically the upper half of the canvas. You’ll also pinpoint areas where you’re improving, and those where you are already pretty good at. It’s a neat reality check — and a great reminder once you review it year after year. Highly recommended!
UX Career Levels For Design Systems Teams
A while back, Javier Cuello has put together a Career Levels For Design System Teams (Figma Kit), a neat little helper for product designers looking to transition into design systems teams or managers building a career matrix for them. The model maps progression levels (Junior, Semi-Senior, Senior, and Staff) to key development areas, with skills and responsibilities required at each stage.
What I find quite valuable in Javier’s model is the mapping of strategy and impact, along with systematic thinking and governance. While as designers we often excel at tactical design — from elegant UI components to file organization in Figma — we often lag a little bit behind in strategic decisions.
To a large extent, the difference between levels of seniority is moving from tactical initiatives to strategic decisions. It’s proactively looking for organizational challenges that a system can help with. It’s finding and inviting key people early. It’s also about embedding yourself in other teams when needed.
But it’s also keeping an eye out for situations when design systems fail, and paving the way to make it more difficult to fail. And: adapting the workflow around the design system to ship on a tough deadline when needed, but with a viable plan of action on how and when to pay back accumulating UX debt.
Find Your Product Design Career Path
When we speak about career trajectory, it’s almost always assumed that the career progression inevitably leads to management. However, this hasn’t been a path I preferred, and it isn’t always the ideal path for everyone.
Personally, I prefer to work on intricate fine details of UX flows and deep dive into complex UX challenges. However, eventually it might feel like you’ve stopped growing — perhaps you’ve hit a ceiling in your organization, or you have little room for exploration and learning. So where do you go from there?
A helpful model to think about your next steps is to consider Ryan Ford’s Mirror Model. It explores career paths and expectations that you might want to consider to advocate for a position or influence that you wish to achieve next.
That’s typically something you might want to study and decide on your own first, and then bring it up for discussion. Usually, there are internal opportunities out there. So before changing the company, you can switch teams, or you could shape a more fulfilling role internally.
You just need to find it first. Which brings us to the next point.
Proactively Shaping Your Role
I keep reminding myself of Jason Mesut’s observation that when we speak about career ladders, it assumes that we can either go up, down, or fall off. But in reality, you can move up, move down, and move sideways. As Jason says, “promoting just the vertical progression doesn’t feel healthy, especially in such a diverse world of work, and diverse careers ahead of us all.”
So, in the attempt to climb up, perhaps consider also moving sideways. Zoom out and explore where your interests are. Focus on the much-needed intersection between business needs and user needs. Between problem space and solution space. Between strategic decisions and operations. Then zoom in. In the end, you might not need to climb anything — but rather just find that right spot that brings your expertise to light and makes the biggest impact.
Sometimes these roles might involve acting as a “translator” between design and engineering, specializing in UX and accessibility. They could also involve automating design processes with AI, improving workflow efficiency, or focusing on internal search UX or legacy systems.
These roles are never advertised, but they have a tremendous impact on a business. If you spot such a gap and proactively bring it to senior management, you might be able to shape a role that brings your strengths into the spotlight, rather than trying to fit into a predefined position.
What About AI?
One noticeable skill that is worth sharpening is, of course, around designing AI experiences. The point isn’t about finding ways to replace design work with AI automation. Today, it seems like people crave nothing more than actual human experience — created by humans, with attention to humans’ needs and intentions, designed and built and tested with humans, embedding human values and working well for humans.
If anything, we should be more obsessed with humans, not with AI. If anything, AI amplifies the need for authenticity, curation, critical thinking, and strategy. And that’s a skill that will be very much needed in 2026. We need designers who can design beautiful AI experiences (and frankly, I do have a whole course on that) — experiences people understand, value, use, and trust.
No technology can create clarity, structure, trust, and care out of poor content, poor metadata, and poor value for end users. If we understand the fundamentals of good design, and then design with humans in mind, and consider humans’ needs and wants and struggles, we can help users and businesses bridge that gap in a way AI never could. And that’s what you and perhaps your renewed role could bring to the table.
Wrapping Up
The most important thing about all these little tools and activities is that they help you get more clarity. Clarity on where you currently stand and where you actually want to grow towards.
These are wonderful conversation starters to help you find a path you’d love to explore, on your own or with your manager. However, just one thing I’d love to emphasize:
Absolutely, feel free to refine the role to amplify your strengths, rather than finding a way to match a particular role perfectly.
Don’t forget: you bring incredible value to your team and to your company. Sometimes it just needs to be highlighted or guided to the right spot to bring it into the spotlight.
You’ve got this — and happy 2026! ✊🏼✊🏽✊🏾
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Useful Resources
- UX Skills Self-Assessment Matrix (Figma template), by Maigen Thomas
- “Product Designer’s Career Levels Paths” + PNG, by Ryan Ford
- Career Decision Map For UX Designers (PNG), by Lily Yue
- Diverse Career Paths For UX Designers (PNG), by Lily Yue
- Shaping Designers and Design Teams, by Jason Mesut
- UX Skills Self-Assessment Map template (Miro), by Paóla Quintero
- UX Skill Mapping Template (Google Sheets), by Rachel Krause, NN/g
- “Design Team’s Growth Matrix”, by Shannon E. Thomas
- Figma Product Design & Writing Career Levels, by Figma
- Content Design Role Frameworks, by Tempo
- “UX Research Career Framework”, by Nikki Anderson
- UX Career Ladders (free eBook), by Christopher Nguyen
- Product Design Level Expectations, by Aaron James
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