Senior designer is taking credit for my work
I’m an associate product designer, and a senior designer on my team is taking credit for my work. She is supposed to be “overseeing” my projects and “mentoring” me... In reality I get 0 feedback and my ideas stolen.
I sent her a few finished mocks for ideas I had yesterday, and she didn’t respond. Today, I sent them over to our team’s pm and he responded - “oh, senior designer showed me those yesterday, genius idea...”. She passed it off as her own. Other examples - she presented my work a few weeks ago at our weekly product sync when I was sick OOO. I didn’t get credit. Whenever I present work at a sprint, she’ll pipe up in the end with a comment that makes it sound like she was involved, and she also adds her name to my decks and Figmas. Pm on my team doesn’t realize and thinks she is great.
Any advice?
comments
Share your ideas with other team members while they are being iterated on. Others will begin to recognize your work as she is presenting it.
People like this will always, eventually, get caught.
Fun story.... This one time, we copied a competitor solution and sent it to the design manager. He floated it to his director as is own and was blasted by senior management.
Especially if you’re new, it’s totally expected and welcomed that you set up 1:1 with members of your team to get to know them.
you could also try getting feedback on your work with your PM (e.g tell them, “hey, I’m working on a few ideas. I’ll be sharing them with <sr. Designer> later this week. Do you mind if I just bounce some initial thoughts off of you”.), just navigate it carefully
I’ve developed a habit of “seeking feedback” from other designers and team members regularly, which serves two purposes. One is visibility: as others have mentioned, when you’re showing WIP or iterations to people outside of your team, they will remember the work as being yours when it does eventually surface. Along these same lines, pipe up in meetings whenever you can add something tangible to the conversation, making sure to speak to the work with a high degree of familiarity to convey your ownership of the design. Speak in a way that the Sr designer cannot mimic, or otherwise make it clear that you are more familiar with the work than they are. I’ve noticed that team stakeholders will default to asking the person who had the highest degree of familiarity with the concept more so than whoever has a higher rank.
The second benefit of seeking feedback is that you are performing some due diligence of getting other’s eyes on the design in the name of collaboration, even if the other person can’t speak to design, they can typically make for a good sounding board. This can look great during perfs and can emphasize you are a team player and such.
Only caveat is to make sure you are remaining self-sufficient, both in reality and perception. Asking for too much help or eyes on a product can seem like you need to be handheld, which is obv not the move here. Good luck
In the meantime, also do as others have mentioned and take ownership of your cross functional relationships by showing your work early and often and soliciting informal feedback