Lattice Design
As designers grow in their careers, they often develop “key strengths” or “spikes” that map to work they’re very good at doing. Given that Lattice has a wide range of products with a diversity of design challenges, we need to get good at recognizing different kinds of strengths in senior designers. That way, we can ensure we’re hiring and developing the specializations we need at our most senior levels and can cover the variety of needs our products have. Ultimately, there is no “one size fits all” to be successful on the design team at Lattice. This document helps to illustrate this point by naming different archetypes of senior talent and the levers they pull to have impact.
This document does not attempt to answer the question of what differentiates L3 vs. L4 vs. L5 performance when mapped against these archetypes. We already have a number of tools at our disposal for calibrating performance at Lattice:
This archetypes document creates another tool and better-shared vocabulary for management calibrations and development conversations with individual product designers.
The Project Lead is highly effective at enabling the success of a team working together on a project. They thrive on collaborating with others and coordinating team members to achieve shared outcomes. They are often the primary point of contact for a project, and act as an owner, ensuring we deliver against customer expectations, full stop. They will often spend time breaking down projects and delegating tasks to others, while ensuring the team operates effectively together with common standards.
The Trailblazer can take a very early product concept and design a scrappy solution that gets it in the hands of customers quickly. They loathe highly detailed product specs from the PM team, because they thrive on ambiguity and filling in the blanks. They spend time understanding customers and the market, and design a product that is minimally scoped to serve the core needs. They are able to make quick design decisions to build a product with speed, and frequently display front-end development skills to either build prototypes or work in the production codebase alongside engineering to make quick changes and improvements. They know where it’s acceptable to cut corners to get the product out to market, while being mindful not to create too much design and product debt.
The Builder combines technical expertise with design acumen to ensure we deliver high-quality experiences to customers. They work closely with their engineering team, pushing code and making adjustments and tweaks to the front-end until their static design work is fully brought to life. Builders are our loudest voice in Design when it comes to topics like responsive design and accessibility, as they have direct experience implementing both (and are intimately familiar with the consequences of not taking them into account in design).