Filters, Skills, and Your Influence Network
#048: The decision-making tools that keep you focused on your design career vision. Part 8 of Design Your Next Move.
The Design Your Next Move Series:
Part 1: Your Design Career Won’t Be Killed by AI; It’ll Be Killed by Inertia
Part 8: Filters, Skills, and Your Influence Network
Part 9: Your Career OS Is a Living System
Last time, I walked you through writing your Career Vision Narrative — describing the day you actually want, not the one you think you’re supposed to want, and building a mission statement that gives you a throughline when everything else is chaotic.
Here’s what happens next: something exciting finally lands in your inbox.
Interesting opportunities are going to come across your desk. Your boss is going to ask you to take on a new project, a startup founder you respect is going to pitch you on a fractional role, maybe a recruiter calls with a role that sounds perfect on paper.
In the moment, all of it will feel urgent: the FOMO, the flattery of being asked, the fear that saying no means missing something you can’t get back. That’s exactly when you need your filters.
A yes/no filter is what lets you make consistent decisions without getting swallowed by emotion in the moment. It’s a set of criteria you write down when you’re clear and calm, so that when chaos arrives, you’re not deciding based on anxiety or excitement. You’re deciding based on what actually matters.
How to build your filters
The filters come directly from your vision and mission. If your mission is civic technology, then “Will this expand my work in civic tech?” is a filter. If your vision includes three or more hours of uninterrupted deep work daily, then “Does this role protect that time?” is a filter.
Some examples of strong filters:
Does this opportunity align with my stated mission?
Does it move me toward my Career Vision Narrative, or further away?
Will it expand my skills in a direction I actually want to go?
Will it bring me into rooms with people I respect and want to learn from?
Can I maintain my values while doing this work?
Is the compensation aligned with the value I’m bringing?
Does it offer enough autonomy, or does it require too much politics to move forward?
Will this energize me or drain me?
Write five to seven filters that matter most to you, then actually use them. A job offer comes in — before you feel excited or scared, run it through the filters. Does it hit most of them? If it hits three out of seven, that’s data. Three out of seven isn’t a yes. It’s a maybe that needs a real conversation.
I learned this the hard way. Early in my career, I was offered a director role with a serious title bump and a raise. It should have been an obvious yes. But when I ran it through my filters — back then, more informal, but filters nonetheless — I realized the role would have required me to be in a physical office five days a week, attend four to six meetings a day, and spend most of my time managing personalities instead of building. It failed three of my core filters immediately.
Saying no to that role felt terrifying at the time. In retrospect, it was the easiest decision I never made easily. Because I had the filters to lean on, I could say: this is a really good opportunity, and it’s not for me.
Skills inventory
Most of us have a resume, and a resume is a marketing document. It tells a lie of omission — it includes only the stuff that sounds impressive and leaves out everything that doesn’t fit the narrative you’re trying to sell.
A skills inventory is honest about what you actually know how to do, at what level, and what you want to get better at. Think about it across a few areas: your core craft (UI, UX research, design systems, prototyping, accessibility, whatever the work actually is), your strategic layer (product strategy, facilitation, analytics, storytelling, business acumen), your interpersonal range — especially the ability to make things happen through people who don’t report to you — and your technical fluency at the edges, whatever sits at the border of “I can do some of this myself.”
For each skill, rate it honestly: Expert (you could teach it), Proficient (you do it regularly and do it well), Beginner (you can do it but you’re still learning), or Curious (you want to get good at this).
The goal isn’t to make everything Expert. The goal is to understand what you have, what’s central to your mission, and what’s worth investing in next. Highlight the skills most central to your mission first. Then identify two or three areas you want to deepen in the next year or two — not five, not ten. Where are the gaps that actually matter?
Map your learning and influence network
You have a network. Everyone does. But most people treat it like a contact list, a bunch of names for when they need something. Think about it differently: your network is where you learn and where you have influence, and both sides of that are worth mapping.
Your mentors are the people who’ve taught you something significant — not necessarily anyone with a formal title. Former managers, senior colleagues, people you admired from afar and reached out to. People who’ve shaped how you think. Your peers are the people doing similar work at similar levels, people you learn from through osmosis, watching how they handle problems, what they prioritize, how they talk about their work.
Then there are people you learn from at a distance — writers, speakers, designers whose thinking shapes yours, whether you know them or just follow them from a distance. And then there’s the other direction: if you write, teach, speak, or put your thinking out into the world in any form, who’s listening? Teaching someone else to think about design differently is a form of influence and growth, and it matters more than most people give it credit for.
Look at the map and find the gaps. Do you have mentors in the areas where you want to grow? Do you have peers who actually challenge you? Are you getting input from people who think differently than you do, or is it mostly an echo chamber? Are you influencing anyone, or is everything coming in?
You might need to invest in one layer specifically — a mentor in AI-assisted design, peer relationships in the civic tech world, finding your way outside your usual circles, or starting to write and teach in order to actually solidify your thinking. These are the moves that compound over a decade. They’re unglamorous and they don’t look like climbing a ladder, but they’re how you actually get good.
Putting it together
None of these — the filters, the skills inventory, the network map — are documents you write once and file away. They’re tools. They work because they’re yours, built from your mission and vision, and they evolve as those things evolve.
Your turn:
Write five to seven yes/no filters that reflect your mission, vision, and values. Make them clear enough that you could hand them to a friend and they’d understand how you make decisions.
Then think about a recent opportunity you said yes or no to and run it through them.
Would you have made the same choice?
If the answer is no, that’s worth sitting with — either the filters need adjusting, or you made the call based on fear or excitement instead of what you said mattered to you. Either one is useful.