The Design Career Playbook

Summary

The IBM Design Career Playbook is the essential resource for design careers at IBM, a cultural artifact and landmark reflecting the maturity of design as a profession in at IBM.

The playbook provides career guidance for formally-trained designers and design managers across brand, product, services, and operations organizations at IBM, which is home to one of the largest enterprise design populations in the world.

This long-form digital experience offers a point-of-view for design specialties like UX Design, Visual Design, Design Research, Content Design, and more. It illuminates the career progression for designers, and outlines expected scope of responsibility and skills for designers at every level, while also communicating the business value of design leadership. It enables designers in effective ways to grow collaborative design skills, evaluate their current career progress, facilitate healthy career conversations, build their portfolios, and envision long-term career paths.

Learn more about the Design Career Playbook release on Medium.
The playbook contains sensitive IP and its contents cannot be shared outside of IBM.

User need

The Design Career Playbook was created to serve these needs of our design community:

• Designers needed information about the design career paths and specialties available at IBM, whether content design, UX design, service design, industrial design, design research, visual design, and how to grow their skills in these areas.

• Designers needed a fundamental understanding of what the path to career progression looks like at IBM. There had already been a well-established path to career progression in engineering roles, and this project would carve that out for designers. They needed to gain an understanding of what is expected at each level of their career at a company-wide scale.

• They needed a formal understanding of what leadership programs and the scope of responsibility of design leaders are at IBM. They needed resources to help them envision a path to leadership.
  

Our goal

The goal of the Design Career Playbook is to define, mature, and grow design as a profession in the context of IBM and the world. From an HR and growth perspective, we sought to set up and maintain a healthy technical pipeline of design leaders and a parallel career track to that of Distinguished Engineers.

Our hill statement:

Unify cross-business design career framework
Designers across product, iX, and GBS share a single career framework that equips them to reliably evaluate their current skills and envision compelling future roles and opportunities at IBM.

The team

This playbook was built by the Designer Success team, who drew from various paper resources and early models. The team was small but mighty, consisting of a team lead/coauthor, a content designer/coauthor (me), a front-end developer, a visual designer, and a researcher. We also leaned on executive sponsorship and support.