Design managers and directors, how is your time spent?
I have a couple offers, one staff and the other a manager role. I have some management experience with having a couple direct reports in the last, I've managed offshore design teams, mentored junior designers, and been involved in a lot of design ops stuff. Is becoming a manager pretty much these things but just doing them all the time? I've had the luxury of being mostly IC while just dabbling in these areas as needed. So in turn I haven't been in endless soul crushing meetings, manage budgets, or hire/fire. I'm at a point I want to figure out if people mgmt is something I'm into as a career path or not. Personally, I love the mix of IC and mgmt responsibilities the problem is I'm not being paid as a manager haha. I worked at Salesforce for a few years and it seems like once you became a manager you literally just went to meetings all day and did no design work. I definitely don't want that kind of a manager role, just not sure how many manager/director roles out there are what I'm talking about. Would love to hear from people in these positions across various companies on their experiences. Thanks! #design #ui/ux
comments
Try principal at a top tech (FAANG)
Unless you are a manager/lead at a startup where you’ll likely be expected to produce design deliverables for developers, you will most likely not be doing design execution as a people manager.