Hey, Miranda here 👋
A year ago I could tell a designer exactly what to do to reach the next title. Ship this kind of work. Show this kind of thinking. Hit these markers. I’d coached close to a dozen people from senior to lead on exactly that map inside my company.
Then Ai hit and that map stopped being true.
So I went looking at the data, because I wanted to know if it was just my company or all of us. It’s all of us. Figma’s 2026 research: 56% of hiring managers want more senior designers. The rung above it — Staff, Principal — isn’t moving with it. Tech promotion rates overall dropped 42% between 2022 and 2025.
The room above you got smaller while the room you’re in got more crowded.
In this article:
Why nobody — including your boss — can give you a straight answer on what “the next level” means right now
The two numbers that prove it’s not you: senior demand is up, the rung above it isn’t
The four skills worth building this week, while everyone above you argues about the role compentencies
What to actually say if you’re the leader stuck giving vague answers (the honest version pulls more trust)
One challenge to run in a real meeting before this piece leaves your head
If you’re aiming for the next title, you know it even if you haven’t put your finger on it yet. The goalposts that used to feel fixed now feel vague, or worse, silent. You ask what “ready” looks like and get an answer that used to be clear and now sounds like a shrug dressed up in corporate language.
If you’re the one giving that vague answer, you know it too. You’re standing in the same fog, just a few steps further up the hill, trying to sound more certain than you are.
Here’s where I sit in all this. I’m not a manager. I’m a Principal Designer, an IC. Part of my job is coaching other designers up the ladder. I’ve helped close to a dozen people make the jump from senior to lead over the last few years in my company.
Lately that part of the job has gotten harder. Purely because I’m less sure what I’m coaching them toward.
I started wondering if this was just my bubble. So I went looking, to see if other companies were stewing in the same fog, or if others were starting to clear it better.
Here’s what’s going on out there for most of us.
Senior hiring is up. Figma’s 2026 research found 56% of hiring managers want more senior designers, against just 25% for junior roles.
What’s missing from that same data: any equivalent growth in Staff or principal hiring. Senior demand is real. The rung above it isn’t moving with it.
This isn’t a design-only problem. Tech promotion rates overall fell 42% between 2022 and 2025, per Gusto’s workforce data. And the rungs themselves are vanishing, not just the promotions onto them, middle management roles at public companies dropped 6.1% over the same window, and several major, profitable companies have spent this year cutting management layers on the record, while their earnings are strong.
Here’s the deeper problem underneath the obvious one: companies are rewriting what “senior” requires in real time, while still expecting people to perform against the old version of it.
Research from Designer Fund and Foundation Capital, surveying 900+ designers, found 50% of design leaders are now weighting AI fluency and systems thinking heavier than narrow craft skill. Leaders in that study described the designers they want as “orchestrators,” people who guide a whole process, not specialists who execute one piece of it well.
That’s a different job written under the same job title. Most companies haven’t finished writing it, let alone published it.
If you’re a leader sitting on that unfinished draft, the silence feels safer than saying something half-formed. I get the instinct. Saying “I don’t know” out loud feels like admitting you’re not doing your job.
It’s the opposite. Your designers don’t expect you to have it solved. They expect you to be thinking about it as hard as they are. Silence reads as either you’ve stopped thinking about it, or you’re hiding something. Neither is true, probably, but that’s what it looks like from where they’re sitting.
If you can’t give clarity yet, say that, and mean it as a pause, not a permanent answer. Don’t dress up “I don’t know” as “you’re on track” just to keep the conversation comfortable. A designer who hears “we’re still figuring this out, give me a quarter” trusts you more than one who gets vague encouragement for the third review in a row and starts wondering if you’re ever going to tell them the truth.
You don’t need a finished framework. You need: “I don’t fully know what the next level requires yet. Here’s what I do know, and here’s when I’ll have more.”
Worth saying plainly to the designers reading this too: your leaders probably haven’t told you this, but a lot of them are just as lost in this as you are. Not because they’re bad at their jobs. Because the thing they’re supposed to be defining for you is still moving under their feet too. That doesn’t make the wait less frustrating. But it might make it feel less personal.
I don’t have a finished map either. Nobody does yet. But four things show up consistently enough, in the research and in what I’m seeing in my own coaching conversations, that I’m comfortable telling people to build toward them now.
Business fluency. Connect a design decision to a number the business cares about, revenue, retention, risk, without a translator. As AI lowers the cost of execution, craft alone gets more exposed. A clear line to outcomes doesn’t.
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