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Updated October 11, 2023You’re reading an excerpt of Land Your Dream Design Job, a book by Dan Shilov. Filled with hard-won, personal insights, it is a comprehensive guide to landing a product design role in a startup, agency, or tech company, and covers the entire design interview process from beginning to end, for experienced and aspriring designers. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
To learn more about design levels and how various companies structure them:
Intercom’s individual contributor design levels and design manager levels, in addition to being open available and detailed, have specific objectives and growth tasks tied to each level.
Basecamp’s Titles for Designers. Although Basecamp is a small company by startup standards, their design framework is rigorous. Aside from describing what are the different expectations of designers, it also publicly lists the names of designers at those levels.
DoorDash’s Head of Design, Helena Seo, shares her thinking and approach toward creating a leveling system at the company.
progression.fyi, a collection of open source company ladders, includes some for design, such as BuzzFeed and Zendesk, among many others.