Letter To A Young Designer Who Feels Stuck
At the beginning of your career, it can tempting to look for the perfect working environment. But what if you don't find it?
Reading time: 5 minutes
You started to work as a designer a couple of years ago, yet you are already hitting a plateau. Recently, you changed jobs because your previous employer didn’t offer a great work environment. But things aren’t much better — the project you are working on is so tightly-framed that there is no room for you contribute in any creative way, your manager is giving you very little feedback, you struggle to project yourself in the future.
You feel stuck.
To get unstuck, you are considering one of the following evolutions: getting promoted to a manager position, changing company, or turning to freelancing.
I have another suggestion for you: Try becoming a better designer.
Here are some ideas on how to accomplish that:
Document the choices you make, focusing on the invisible, foundational decisions;
Find a learning opportunity in your project;
Try to apply a new method/tool that has been nagging you for some time;
Review your current project and eliminate the unnecessary noise that crept into it over the course of your explorations;
Break down the project you are working into smaller problems, figure out which companies have solved one of them in a world-class way, and copy their solutions;
Dig into the data you are missing, without stopping at the first obstacle;
If you really can’t find any data, make up some precise hypotheses;
Use the data to adjust your design proposal;
Request feedback before reaching a satisfying place;
React to feedback so well that people will trust your expertise even more — this doesn’t mean having an answer for every question thrown at you;
Give feedback in such a manner that the person’s reaction will be “Thank you so much for pointing that out, this is incredibly useful”;
Get used to making progress without receiving feedback;
Communicate about the project you are working on, not to justify your work but to help others understand what’s happening around them;
Connect your project with those of others, by identifying synergies, conflicts and dependencies;
Ask specific questions about a topic that is partially related to the one you are working on;
Identify the most quiet person in meetings, and ask for their opinion about a topic you are working on;
Look for an opportunity to shadow a peer — maybe from another company, even;
Find a more senior colleague and ask whether they could spend 15 minutes of their time to give you their perspective on a problem you are facing;
Pay attention to someone you are jealous of, figure out what they have that you want, and come up with a plan to get it;
Write to someone you admire and let them know how they influenced you, with a detailed example;
Make the link between your project and with strategic priorities;
Explore in a visual way the consequences that different strategic paths could look like;
Observe internal processes, identify glitches, and experiment tiny adjustments;
Suggest organizational improvements;
Prepare a question for the next team meeting;
Ask your manager how you can help her;
Identify a topic that tickles you, make it a learning priority, and tell others about it;
Read an article about your field, summarize the three most interesting points according to you and share it with three people;
Read a professional book, turn it into a simple and powerful framework, and start applying it;
Teach others a skill you have learned;
etc.
This list could go on forever. The opportunities for you to grow are endless, hundreds of them are waiting for you. You are not stuck.
Your situation may be particularly complicated right now. I hear you. I’m sorry for that. You don’t deserve it, and I hope it will change soon. Until then, there is something you can do.
From the list above, pick one — just one — idea that resonated with you, and give it a try.
Don’t expect instant results. Consider trying two or three times before anything happens. If you still feel stuck, come back to that list, and repeat the process. Something will happen, I guarantee you. It may take time, it may require a bit of blind faith, but your situation will evolve.
Over time, this loop — feeling stuck, browsing the list for ways to become better at what you do, putting it in action — will become such a habit that you won’t need that list anymore. This mental habit will become a bigger factor to your success than your ability to switch working environment when it doesn’t match your expectations.
You are feeling stuck because, somehow, you have come to believe that you need your environment to meet certain conditions in order to grow. You need a different environment.
One day, you will discover that you were never stuck. You were just standing there, waiting for the permission to move. And those big mountains surrounding you? They were really a series of small hills, that you could go over, one hill at a time.
Accept the situation. Accept the suboptimal environment you are in. Your current environment is an opportunity for you to realize that you are much more in control of your destiny than you think.
On that journey, there are no shortcuts. Honest effort and patience with yourself are the only way to progress. But developing the ability to enjoy work and thrive in any environment is a skill that will serve you forever.
And here’s the ironic bit — the better a designer you become, the more likely you will be to find the better environment you are looking for.
You are not stuck. Get to work.
Thank you to Clémence Végnant, Delphine Barnavon, Olga Vorovka and Martin Boisramé.
Post-scriptum: Tristan Charvillat and I just unveiled a 2-day product discovery training, focused on the method that we described in the Discovery Discipline book.
The training has been entirely designed by us, in collaboration with Thiga Academy experts. I will be giving the training myself for the first sessions.
More information about this training
See you there?