How I Coach Designers to Meet Their Career Goals
Overview
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Based on my experience of being a teacher, I have created a Professional Development Framework for designers
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Each month, I meet with each designer to discuss their career path, goals, and what actions we can take together to achieve them
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Each designer's goals are tailored to their career path while making a positive impact on the business and our team
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At the end of each session, I mark their achievements to boost confidence, and set up a checklist for their next set of goals
Examples of Helping Designers Meet Their Goals
Jump links to examples in this case study below:
Skills
Professional Development, Mentoring, Coaching, Education, Career Advancement, Design Training, Design Team Management
Time Frame
December 2021 - Present
Role
As a Senior Experience Design Manager, I mentor and coach designers to help them meet their career goals. I look for opportunities where they can positively impact the business by connecting with others and executing in projects they are strong in.
Outcome
I have managed 20 designers (during my time at CVS) to successfully complete career goals that help with their professional development and positively impact the business:
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Promoted a designer
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Improved trust & relationships through coaching how to give design feedback
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Empowered designers to carve their career path and focus on projects that matter most to them — resulting in faster delivery
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Made our workflow and process more efficient by collaborating with designers to standardize engineer collaboration & QA
In our company-wide engagement survey, my direct reports anonymously reported that their highest satisfaction at work is the relationship with me as their manager, the feedback I give, and that I value them.
Creating my Professional Development Framework
How has my teaching experience informed how I coach designers to meet their goals?
My experience as a former teacher in special education has helped me build a framework based on a student Individualized Education Plan (IEP).
A teacher uses an IEP framework to create a plan to help a student meet specific goals. The framework has the teacher:
1. Establish goals
2. Set learning objectives for the student that measure success
3. Create a checklist for the student to meet those learning objectives
Converting the IEP into a Designer-focused Professional Development Framework
I adapted the IEP format to a framework that would work for designers.
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Goals: Together, the designer and I can brainstorm a list of possible goals through a career development discussion that I facilitate. They can then select a set of goals that they're most passionate about and ones that I think can positively impact the business.
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Learning Objectives: Similar to the IEP, I created a section for us to write a statement to measure if the designer met the goal.
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Checklist: Goals, especially long-term goals, can be tricky to know where to start. A checklist helps the designer break the goals down into smaller steps, similar to the IEP.
How do I put this framework into action?
To use this framework, I set up monthly Professional Development sessions with each designer. The first 3 sessions are usually conducted in 2 weeks.
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Session 1: In the first session, I facilitate a career reflection discussion with the designer to identify career goals.
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Session 2: Based on our previous brainstorm, I help the designer select goals that are relevant to their career and that may benefit the business.
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Session 3: Review the selected goals, write Learning Objectives to establish what success looks like, and write a checklist of tasks to break each goal down into bite-size chunks.
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All following sessions: I meet with the designer once per month to review existing goals, objectives, and tasks, and write new goals if needed. I will mark their achievements (goal completion, project deliveries, career milestones) in a calendar that we can review at the end of the year for end-of-year assessments.
Examples of how I've coached designers to meet their career goals
Getting a designer promoted to a Design Lead role
I had a designer on my team who was executing very well across all parts of the design process, and upon reflecting on their career, they decided they wanted to become a Design Lead.
I assessed his skillset against the job description of the Design Lead role.
We used my professional development framework to set new goals for them to demonstrate those lead responsibilities:
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Demonstrating mastery of their knowledge in Figma and UX
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Mentoring other designers
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Leading projects on their own
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Raising their visibility as a leader to the design org
To solidify their knowledge in Figma and UX practices, I researched and suggested a list of courses that this designer could take. They could then demonstrate their knowledge with tougher projects and mentoring designers.
I walked this designer through a framework of how to mentor other designers.
I paired this designer up with another one in the org who was interested in learning more advanced tips on using Figma with our design system. After 6 months of mentorship, this designer helped the other meet their own career goals.
Following the goals and learning objectives we set, I assigned projects related to the design system for this designer to lead. They created a design system for our email designs — something that was widely praised by leadership.
To top it off, I collaborated with them to set up a workshop to upskill our design team on converting web designs to native iOS/Android. With some light coaching, they were able to set up an activity in Figma to teach designers the new skill.
After the designer met the career goals we set, they successfully raised their visibility to leadership with the workshops and design work they led. Since they demonstrated the new responsibilities, they received a well-deserved promotion into the Design Lead role.
Coaching a designer to improve how they give design feedback
After a re-org at CVS in January 2024, I inherited a few new designers on my team.
One of the new designers received a negative comment from one of their peers during end-of-year reviews, saying their feedback on design work can be harsh.
During our professional development discussion using the framework, the designer brought this up as their number one priority to address. They are an extremely collaborative person and wanted to make sure they improved in this area.
Using the professional development framework, I set learning objectives with two milestones:
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By end of Q1, practice a new framework of giving feedback based on Radical Candor (see below)
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By mid-year, receive honest feedback from peers on how they give/receive feedback
To coach the designer on delivering feedback in a kinder way, I researched different methods and chose the "Radical Candor" feedback method. This states that we can give feedback in both an honest and kind way.
I worked with the designer on specific ways of framing feedback using the following steps:
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Give a positive comment
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Translate feedback into a question
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Deliver the question sensitively
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(Optional) Offer to help brainstorm if the person is stuck
We even walked through examples, specific phrases to use, and how to translate negative feedback into a curious question.
By mid-year, I added a question to our mid-year peer feedback survey:
"On a scale of 1-5 (1: low, 5: high), how well does the colleague give and receive feedback on design work? If you rated a 5, why? If you didn't rate a 5, what would merit a 5?"
All five peers rated the designer 5/5, with one commenting, "Gives constructive feedback in helpful and respectful ways. They appreciate each designer on the team and seek out ways to give support" and another saying "Great at asking questions."
This designer successfully met their goals and has a new toolset for giving feedback in a kind and honest way.
Carving out a specialized research-focused role for a designer that benefitted the entire team
One of the designers that reported to me brought up that they weren't feeling satisfied with UI-focused work. They were great at UI and always delivered designs on time, but it wasn't their passion.
We worked together to reset the professional development board with goals that were more suited to the way they wanted their career to go:
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More focused on research
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Opportunities to lead discovery-focused work
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"Early" UX was this person's greatest strength, and they wanted to dive deeper into using those skills (UX strategy, wireframing, information architecture, competitive analysis)
We ended up creating new goals and learning objectives that aligned closer to this designer's passions:
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Discovery / Early UX
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Pick up, execute, and deliver discovery-related features by end of year
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UX Research
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Start mentorship with a researcher to learn new research methods
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Apply UXR skills to a research project by end of year
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Data & Analysis
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Get certified in Quantum Metrics tool
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Apply Quantum Metrics skills to identify optimizations to our products
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I also reached out the the Research Manager to set up a mentorship between this designer and a researcher to further increase his skills as he took on more research-focused work. The designer and researcher ended up meeting each sprint for several months.
I communicated these new goals to our Director and Design Leads, so that we were able to shift any research or discovery-related projects to this designer.
The reason this worked so well was that research and discovery was shared across all designers initially, but it wasn't necessarily the passion of other designers.
This new re-alignment of work benefitted everyone: This allowed other designers to focus on the parts of the process they enjoyed, and resulted in this research-focused designer to execute high-quality work quickly over the next month:
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Research on how visuals/illustrations in our health service emails may impact engagement
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Research on push notifications and the opportunities we have to improve the patient experience with their health visit notifications
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Discovery on opportunities to personalize how patients find the right care with CVS Health (based on what we know about you, what suggestions can we make to schedule appointments faster and get you the help you need)
Empowering designers to improve our design process
While I facilitate Sprint Retros each sprint to gather feedback from the team on how we can improve, two designers each had a specific goal that they wanted to improve a part of our design process on their own.
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They identified that we weren't meeting often with engineers and could improve collaboration with them.
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We also had no standard process for QA from the design org, so we decided to make our own and share it with the org.
I set goals for each of them in their boards to improve our processes and share with the wider org.
I set up an initial call with both designers to review their goals on improving the process and suggested that they start by mapping out the design and development process to see where our collaboration gaps were.
With light feedback from me, they ran with this initiative by:
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Interviewed designers/engineers/product to identify collaboration gaps
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Created a collaboration gap map
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Proposed Mid-Sprint Dev Syncs
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Created a checklist for Design QA before engineers push work to production
After these two designers proposed these improvements to our team, we tested them for 2 sprints (4 weeks) and then had a retro with the team for any feedback. We ended up creating a Rally (Jira) story template for the QA process to make it easier for designers to check off what was QA'd.
I worked with our Design Program Manager to have them present these collaboration improvements to Directors, Managers, and Leads to share what we did and show how successful they were for the team. Another team ended up adopting our model.
This initiative is a great example of how empowering designers and guiding them with clear goals can improve a work environment for everyone.
Achievements & Celebrations
How I track individual achievements
Along with the professional development template, I created a calendar view of the achievements for each designer.
At the end of each monthly professional development session, I would walk through their achievements throughout the past month:
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Design deliveries
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Completion of goals and career milestones
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Successful collaborations with designers, engineers, and product
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Process improvements they've helped with
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Peer feedback and shout-outs that I've received for them
How I celebrate team achievements
While I focus on each individual's career goals and achievements, it's always a great morale boost to put it all together in one picture at the end of each quarter.
I summarize achievements for each person and allow everyone to add additional shout-outs at the bottom. This is a celebration call I have at the end of each quarter. We'll take the time to celebrate and then look to the exciting opportunities that are coming ahead.
