Now that you’ve done your skills self-assessment it’s time to think about the company that can help you grow. When we’re looking for a job we usually think of “searching” for work. What if instead we thought of hiring a job for our needs? A supportive environment will feel like wind at your back—presenting you the opportunities to do your life’s best work.

Think through the company’s characteristics that are important to you as if you’re evaluating a candidate. What makes them great? Who would you pass and who would you hire?

We’ll look at 9 things in total:

Design maturity of the company you’re applying to Your future manager, their background and expertise Culture at a micro and macro level In-house design or design agency Consumer or enterprise positions Platforms, mature or emerging Location of the company and the surrounding ecosystem Industry specialization or breadth of expertise Impact and outcomes you’re interested in driving

Your dream job

Before we begin, feel free to follow along by grabbing the dream job template from Google Drive which you can copy and fill out to brainstorm potential future options.

What does your next dream role look like? Try brainstorming some options with this dream jobs template

One way to think about your next job is to think about your most recent role or the previous ones you’ve had. What worked there? What didn’t? What do you want to do more of or less of? Think of it as a personal job retrospective.

Design maturity

A mature design company has internalized and established proven design processes that it has honed over many years. Design is not a layer on top but an integral piece for how a product portfolio is put together—a company’s strategic advantage.

High design maturity companies are great places to learn quickly and with rigor. You can continue to stay and develop your skills further to become a skilled specialist (i.e. design lead) or a manager. Alternatively you can seek a different challenge altogether by going to a low design maturity company to build their design culture and acumen.

High design maturity → focus on the work

For a designer who’s just starting out, it’s best to go to a company that already has the design process established. This means you can focus on what you do best — honing in on your craft and getting your craft skills refined while at the same time expanding your collaboration skills by building relationships with your team and across departments.

You will be paired with a mentor, a peer and a manager, giving you the opportunity to get continuous feedback and help you quickly accelerate and grow. This is an invaluable experience and will pay dividends in the long-term. It is like being in design school all over again, except in this case you’re being paid to learn and the org is vested in your success.

In low maturity orgs you could end up wasting precious cycles fighting to do the work as opposed to doing the work. Photo by William Iven.

Low design maturity → opportunity to build a process

Usually companies that have low design maturity are on a smaller size. Though I’ve worked in companies that were tiny and had better design sensibility than some of the larger orgs. It all varies — but with low design maturity companies you’re facing the challenge of defining design.

This is more of a process and management role which places less emphasis on craft skills. This type of challenge is perfect for industry veterans who have their craft down, have developed processes before and now have the responsibility and autonomy to establish a design process at this company.

Resources

There are many different definitions out there and some great resources on this topic such as the Level Up by Heather Phillips or InVision’s recent report — InVision about design maturity. Lastly, another way to look at design maturity is through the lens of culture. Companies that have a low design maturity but a culture that’s open to design and experimentation can be a great fit as well and can accelerate your growth.

Your manager

Your future design manager will play a huge role in your career. They will have the final say about your performance — if you did well, if you did poorly, if you get a raise, if you’re eligible for promotion or if you should be let go because of poor performance or because the company’s not doing well. What kind of manager would you like to hire?

The design manager

Think about the skills that you’re trying to improve and how your future manager can support you. Ideally they come from a design background — either they’ve studied design formally, or they’ve learned on the job and progressed to a high level of craft and collaboration. This type of manager will help you grow as an individual contributor, put you in a position that plays to your strengths, while also supporting your efforts in navigating the company.

The non-design manager

Now depending on where you go—your manager might actually not come from a design background at all but instead they’ve come from adjacent fields (e.g. product management, engineering). That’s not a bad thing necessarily. In fact, some strong designers as individual contributors get promoted to manager level and end up performing poorly.

Good management is hard and in fact a few of the best managers I’ve worked with were non-designers. While you won’t get as much craft knowledge from these folks, you can still get a lot of value from their expertise in the domain, the company, and the collaboration skills. These are all crucial things for a designer to be successful.

Personality and values

Another thing to watch out for is a manager’s personality. As you start interviewing and getting to know different types of managers — try to glean into their working style and personality. Would you be able to get along well with them? How do they react under pressure? How have they handled designers like you in the past and supported their growth efforts?

Culture: company, team, design

When we think of culture we usually think this company has great culture due to perks like free lunches, or great offsites, or lavish offices. These are all surface characteristic or artifacts of a culture, which usually runs much deeper — it’s the way things get done in an organization.

Careers at Dropbox takes a humorous spin on the tired cliches of culture.

Some companies might look great on the outside but the reality on the inside is very different. When interviewing for companies it’s important to find out the real deal and at the same time it helps to think about a company’s characteristics that are important to you, that is, which environment aligns best with your values.

Industry and company culture

A company’s culture can be somewhat loosely defined by the industry that it operates in. For example healthcare companies (even startups) are still bound by laws, rules and regulations and therefore innovation might not be there as fast as a consumer company that doesn’t have those restrictions.

Team culture

Within the company’s culture and perhaps the most important part — is the culture of the team you’ll be working on and the values that your peers have — the product manager, the data scientist, the engineers and so on. Since they’ve been vetted by the interviewing process they will have the macro cultural values but depending on the team, they might prioritize things differently.

A company’s culture is shaped by its industry and by it’s first employees. Individual departments and teams have their own unique subcultures.

For example some teams might value bleeding edge design that might not be feasible for the rest of the population. Other teams might be much more conceptual or future focused. Be sure to get to know these people once you start actively interviewing. Understanding this culture is more important since you’ll be working with these people 8+ hours a day.

Closing thoughts on culture

In summary, if you’ve done your homework and researched the company you’re able to weed out the companies that have “bad” cultures (toxic environments with high turnover). They exist but there are few of them. The most important thing is to find a culture that resonates with your personal values.

How do you like to get work done? Do you prefer a more laid back environment or something more intense? Do you crave for structure and organization (such as in a large company) or are you fine operating in chaotic environments where things might change every day and the problems are far more ambiguous (a tiny startup)?

Beyond company culture, what kind of team do you like to work with? If the team you join gets disbanded, would you still be interested in working with those people (who might now be in a different company) or do you believe in the mission of the company more?

Additional resources

Although it’s more engineering focused, Key Values is a useful resource for getting a sense of product culture at startups.