Just getting my start as far as my design career is concerned so want to optimize for growth and learning, further developing my design skills as an individual contributor and being able to work through an end-to-end design process. Can anyone comment on if there is any considerable difference in design culture at these two? I realize they are both banks so just trying to make the best decision as far as which opportunity will help me grow in my career but it feels like splitting hairs. Trying to eventually leave the fintech industry. Wells Fargo Base: 135k Bonus: 14k Location: New York, NY Product: Designing External Facing website - resources and documentation for developers at other companies to integrate Wells Fargo experiences Differences: More Ownership, Larger Scope, Smaller user group (external developers), Smaller team, mostly in SF JP Morgan Chase Base: 135k Bonus: 17k Location: Brooklyn, NY Product: Designing communications across lines of business (All of Consumer + Private Bank) - emails, push notifications, messages in application, banners, toasts etc. Differences: Smaller scope, higher visibility/larger user group, team has a lot of tech debt currently limiting design team, Larger team, mostly in NY Wells Fargo team I'll be able to take more ownership and take a bigger scope of work as far as the design and process is concerned but it is comparatively less visibility, while the JPMorgan team there seems to be a bit more opportunity for mentorship with the team being a bit larger and based in NY, more visibility but smaller scope of work YoE: 4 in Engineering, 0-2 in UX #design #ui/ux
Visibility will always outweigh scope because what’s the point of taking on bigger scope if no one sees it? Especially earlier on, this will help your career down the road with promos.
I think it depends, right? with WellsFargo at least, you’re working on stuff that’s extremely valuable to a specific audience. You would ultimately have the chance to shape more of the overall developer experience—great opportunities to learn and demonstrate deep thinking and have a tangible impact on how effectively people work. Working on stuff with wider visibility is of course super challenging too, but it doesn’t necessarily have the same level of what we can broadly call “complexity.” But yes, pretty important that someone actually sees & uses the products you work on.
API documentation & resource repository is easier said than done and there are a lot of design roles in that space, so Wells Fargo could be a great opportunity! Places like Stripe, all the cloud service providers, and future things like AI SaaS will likely need designers with this sort of past experience.
Yes, very much so :-) I don’t want to knock the JPMC role, but the DevX work at Wells is no joke and potentially really cool. AI SaaS is profoundly interesting too. Arguably a lot of that has much in common with messaging, and being able to trace sources and shape prompts and all sorts of interactions that aren’t easily done well.
These are really different designs, a documentation site for devs vs. platform messaging. Where do you want to take your career? Technical or consumer? One thing to note is documentation design is a niche that could be a dead end because it's not really app design. But the doc site will involve more interesting problem solving and thinking. Messaging patterns and standards are a solved design problem. It will be about design system standards and enforcement.
No one expects a junior designer to have a large scope. I would be concerned about JPM role as it almost sounds like a marketing design gig rather than a product design role. If you're working on websites and tuning it, you can potentially spin that into a growth designer career. I am starting to see more those roles pop up. It's pretty interesting that experimentation has become a specialty.