The guru route
This came to mind this week as I was texting with a previous colleague and she was discussing her new manager - "not all designers are managers, stop making management the only progression".
The old deal
It's 4am, turn of the century, I'm in Ohio and I'm thinking about career ladders.
Here's the deal most of us were offered. You get really good at your craft. You design lovely things, or you build products people actually use and as a reward, we stop you doing it.
You get direct reports, annual reviews, 1:1s, meetings, maybe even a budget. And a lot less time doing the thing that made you good in the first place and quite often no training.
Some people enjoy that move. Plenty don't. They become reluctant managers, its the only way they feel they can progress, Their craft gets rusty and the business loses a great maker and gains an okay-ish manager. Not my favourite trade.
The guru route
I have had a competency framework that I carry in my toolbox for decades. I tweak it when needed. The 4am musing came from chatting to one of my most talented designers in his 121 - he'd always assumed he'd go into management. We were discussing his career and he said " I always thought I wanted your job - but now I see what you do - and I don't". Makes you think! So I created a fork. I call it the guru route.
At Lead level you choose. A Lead has direct reports - still does some hands-on work, but is more focused on people management and work allocation. A Principal stays in the work, takes on the hardest problems, and is accountable for the standard of the craft. Same level. Same pay. Same recognition. You don't have to manage people to progress.
The Principal isn't a consolation prize for people who "aren't management material". It's for people who chose it. They pair with designers on their thorniest problems, settle the arguments the team keeps going round in circles on, and produce the work everyone else measures themselves against. (It's also a role you lose by stopping. No resting on your portfolio.)
Then AI moved the furniture
I take my competency framework with me from role to role and adjust it to the organisation. For a long while this has been a few tweaks to the roles - nothing major. Then AI changed the ladders. Designers prototyping with a real model in the loop. PMs building working apps before lunch. Specs written for agents as well as engineers. None of that was in anyone's job description, and job descriptions are not known for keeping up.
So I made two changes.
AI went into every level. Not a bolt-on section at the back that everyone skips. A junior designer checks what the AI gives them before trusting it. A senior builds the prompts and patterns other people reuse. A Lead sets the standards and the quality bar. Head of Design owns how AI sits in the whole workflow, including the risky bits nobody wants to own (IP on generated assets, accessibility, the regulations).
New shapes of role. Some PMs are now more builders than product managers. Some designers ship front-end code. So there are specialisms that sit on the normal ladder: Product Builder, AI Product Manager, Design Engineer, AI/Conversational Designer. The title signals depth, not seniority. The builder routes are opt-in, with a clear quality bar, and engineers still own production architecture and the final merge. (Enthusiasm is lovely. Enthusiasm in production is a different conversation.)
Both sides get what they need
People get flexibility. You can go deep or go broad, manage or make, and still see a way up. The company gets the skills it actually needs now, not the ones it needed five years ago.
A framework is only useful if people use it, though. So there's a small private tool called Where am I? You pick your role and level, and it shows only what the next level asks for. You mark yourself honestly, then take the summary to your 1:1. "Not yet" is a perfectly normal answer. A list of them is what a good development conversation is built on.
And those 1:1s happen every month. They're about careers, not status updates. (If you want a status update, there's a board for that.)
Tip
Find the level in your ladder where people start managing, and put the fork there. Make the craft route equal in level, pay and title. If it sits lower, it isn't a fork. It's a siding.
Starter for 10
Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track - Will Larson on the senior craft route in engineering. The guru route's older cousin.
The Engineer/Manager Pendulum - Charity Majors on moving between making and managing over a career, rather than choosing once and for all.
LinkedIn's Associate Product Builder - how LinkedIn replaced its APM programme with a role that blends product, design and engineering.
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