Designers often act as professional diplomats, spending substantial time aligning stakeholders, selling ideas, and managing expectations. Coordination has become a proxy for seniority, shifting career paths away from hands-on craft toward strategic decision-making and stakeholder alignment. Junior roles emphasize direct design work with some coordination. Senior roles emphasize guiding vision, strategy, and cross-functional coordination while reducing routine design tasks. The rise of coordination stemmed from product development needs for large, multidisciplinary teams and the requirement for buy-in across engineering, product, and marketing. The result is a career ladder that prizes managing complexity over creating design solutions.
Designers have long been professional diplomats - spending hours in meetings, aligning stakeholders, and navigating politics. We've mastered selling ideas, managing expectations, and coordinating teams. But is that about to change? The coordination trap The uncomfortable truth: coordination has become a proxy for seniority in design careers. The traditional path often looks like this: Junior Designer: Primarily focused on hands-on design work, with some coordination tasks to support the team.
Senior Designer: Shifts more towards strategic decision-making and coordination, while still contributing to hands-on design work, but with an increased focus on guiding the overall vision and direction. We've built a career ladder where success means moving away from actual design work. Our value is now more about managing complexity than creating solutions. Why coordination became king This was necessary because creating products required large teams with different specialties. Design traditionally required buy-in from multiple stakeholders - engineering for feasibility, product for business value, marketing...
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