Work at a company that is design-agnostic, not design-mature

Stop dreaming about working at an ideal company, be employed and start building your own ideal environment instead.

Thanks Marten for this lovely picture.

I got off a webinar-lecture about design processes, done by a designer at a large, considerably design-mature company. It wasn’t particularly interesting for me because it was junior-focused, so a lot of the content I consider too elementary and a little bit misleading because of its over-simplification of the topic.

I’ve noticed that a lot of educational content available to junior designers today tend to condition them into believing that certain methods or processes are the correct answer to every design problem.

And that is a big issue in my opinion, but I won’t talk about that today. Or any other day in the near future.

But I will say this: When you are conditioned to think one company’s process is the ideal, you lose track of what other ways there is to develop a design process.

So today we’ll be exploring growth and design maturity. Because truly, how do we reach design maturity in the first place?

The Design-Mature Company

So many designers glow at working at a design-mature company. It’s understandable why they would to want to do so; design and product processes in these companies are clean and established. It’s yet another safe haven for designers, especially juniors, to practice design in the real world in a very controlled environment.

But when you keep working in a companies that has processes already set up, you don’t get first-hand knowledge and experience of how a company actually got there. You don’t gain the ability to understand what a company needs to do and mistakes they need to make in order to transition into their current process.

How would you actually know if your processes are correct if that’s the case? It all becomes a game of “Don’t bend what didn’t break”.

Design-mature or predictable management tactics?