Newsletter issue: #164
Read time: 1m 04s

Your promotion is playing hard-to-get.

You've mastered every Figma plugin known to mankind, your colour theory would make Picasso jealous, and you can wireframe in your sleep.

Yet somehow, Sarah from product who just started learning Figma last year is now your boss.

What. The. Actual. Hell. 🤬

After watching hundreds of designers struggle (including past-me), I've identified the 6 skills that can get you promoted:

1. Business impact, not just pretty pixels: learn how design affects revenue and retention.
2. Problem-focused communication: don't showcase your design, showcase the problem you solved and the results you delivered.
3. Self-sufficiency: find answers before asking questions. My manager once said, "What do YOU think?" Translation: figure it out yourself.
4. Feedback as fuel: stop defending your work. Instead: appreciate, integrate, and transform based on critique. Show results, not resistance.
5. Confident experimentation: senior designers throw out imperfect ideas constantly. They're not always right, they're just comfortable being wrong (while moving fast).
6. Career ownership: your manager isn't planning your promotion. Track your wins, set clear goals and build your case proactively.

An okay designer who excels in these 6 areas will get promoted faster than an amazing designer who doesn't (This happened to me!).

Finally, if you've been operating at the next level for 6+ months with no recognition. The fastest way up might be somewhere else.

Your move, designer.

Below I break down (in detail) the 6 skills above, how to respond to feedback (my 5-Level Feedback Response Hierarchy) and 10 critical red flags that signal it's time to leave your job.

It’s a juicy one:

Make Me A Fantastic Designer

🔥 HOT THIS WEEK

The goings ons

Happenings & shenanigans in the (design) world and beyond

Figma is a public company. With their initial stock price of $33.00 per share. It went up to a whopping $150 per share. That's a 250+% surge! The largest US venture-capital backed tech IPO in the last 4 years. Figma's valuation is now nearly $68 billion. More than triple Adobe's failed $20 billion acquisition offer. SUCK IT ADOBE! But the real winners are not Figma, it's institutional investors like Goldman Sachs who made $2.8B from the stock. I'll wait for the dip to buy. Are you all-in on Figma?

Struggling as a solo designer? In today's livestream, I'll be speaking Karla Fernandes about How To Be A Design Team-of-One AMA. Join us if you got some stakeholder troubles. Karla's had 25+ years plus experience working with 150+ clients. A juicy one coming up! Missed it? Here's the recording.

In the last 3 months, I travelled to 9 countries. Here’s the highlights of UK, Turkey, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, New York, Mexico, and Japan (soon). Expect my Instagram to be: more casual, a bit silly, the design stuff you know and love. Come hang out on IG?​