Autonomy and Ambiguity Define Your Career

2 min read

Career management for designers can get overly complicated. In an attempt to provide people with precise expectations documents, level definitions, absolute fairness and HR compliance, the whole effort can buckle under its own weight.

Whenever career debates end up mired in HR language or endless calibration/review debates, I find it helpful to retreat to a more straightforward framework consisting of only two axes.

  1. Autonomy - How independent is the person? How long could you leave them without checking in on their progress and still have it be on a productive path?

  2. Ambiguity - How ambiguous a problem can you give them to solve?

As a manager I would not expect an intern or new grad to go more than a day or two before checking in on their progress. Imagine leaving an intern on something and checking back in 6 weeks. You will find they spun off in unproductive directions or, worse, made little progress in the time because they didn’t know what to do. They have low autonomy until they build the instincts to operate more independently.

The same with ambiguity. The class of problems you can assign to designers has to be commensurate with their ability to think and design in ambiguous spaces. Asking someone who has never worked through unknown problems to solve one is not setting them up for success.

As people progress in their career we are able to leave them for longer lengths of time without a lot of guidance or oversight. They can be trusted with increasingly complex problems. These problems are not just complex from a design perspective but can also include organizational complexity (e.g. co-ordinating and aligning multiple teams across an org or company).

At the highest level, the most senior designers and managers can operate with high autonomy and ambiguity. You can hand them the hardest problems your company has and trust they will drive them to conclusion. This does not mean they won’t ask for help or input from time to time but these requests will be reasonable and outside what you might expect them to be able to solve on their own.

When evaluating people for promotion, you can assess and compare them to others in terms of autonomy and ambiguity. Reducing to these two dimensions makes things a lot easier.