How Design Leadership Promotions Actually Work
#033: The hidden levers that determine when — and if — you move up.
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You’ve been doing everything right. You deliver great work, your peers trust you, and leadership leans on you for the hardest problems. You’re the designer others come to when things get stuck, but when the next promotion cycle rolls around, your name isn’t on the list.
You look around and think: What else could I have done?
Most designers who hit this moment assume the path forward is about perfecting what they already do — getting faster, more polished, more consistent — but the truth is far less linear. Getting promoted in a large company isn’t about mastering your craft; it’s about demonstrating that you can handle more complexity and that the business is ready for you to do so.
The illusion of linear growth
In early design careers, growth feels predictable as you learn, improve, and get rewarded for doing so. The lines between levels are clear, and the expectations are usually measurable. But as you move into senior roles, that clarity fades.
At this stage, promotions aren’t about how good you are at design. They’re about how ready you are to operate in systems that are more complex than the ones you’ve already mastered.
In every large company I’ve worked in, there was an unspoken rule: to move up at senior levels, your scope of influence — or the complexity of your work — had to roughly double.
That might mean leading a broader portfolio of experiences instead of a single product, shifting from designing features to designing systems, or shaping cross-functional strategy instead of just executing it.
The higher you go, the more you’re expected to think in systems rather than artifacts.
Promotions depend on context, not just competence
This is the part that stings: you can’t get promoted into a vacuum.
Even if you’re performing well above your current level, there needs to be space in the organization for your next one. Sometimes, that space doesn’t exist yet. Sometimes, it exists in theory but not in budget. And sometimes, no one has yet articulated the business problem that your next level of skill could solve.
That’s why so many designers plateau. They’re waiting for an opening instead of helping create one.
I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. Every time I’ve helped start a new design ops or design system function at a Fortune 500 company, it wasn’t because someone handed me a charter or headcount. It was because I could see a pattern: design inefficiency, inconsistency, or bottlenecks slowing teams down. I named the problem, made the case for change, and built a small experiment to prove the value.
When people saw the impact, the role emerged around the work.
Promotions often work the same way. The organization has to see and feel the value of what your next level looks like before it formalizes the title.
Stretching into greater complexity
So what does it actually mean to “stretch into complexity”? It’s not about working longer hours or juggling more projects — it’s about shifting how you think and where you focus.
At some point, mastery of craft becomes table stakes. What matters next is your ability to scale your impact. That can mean turning design patterns into reusable playbooks, improving how teams collaborate, or bridging gaps between functions like design, product, and engineering.
You’re no longer being measured on what you can produce, but on what others can do because of the systems you’ve built.
Think of it as designing at the meta level — the systems that enable great design to happen repeatedly and predictably.
Show the value before the title
Here’s the unfair part: you usually have to prove the value of that new level before anyone recognizes it.
That’s frustrating, but it’s also how trust is earned in large systems.
The key is to identify a problem the business already cares about — something tied to cost, velocity, consistency, or customer impact — and show how your approach to design can improve it. Then make the outcomes visible. Translate your design improvements into language the business understands: faster releases, fewer dependencies, higher conversion, lower support costs.
And this isn’t something you have to navigate alone. A good manager should help you find these opportunities, align them with strategic priorities, and make sure the right people see the results.
If your manager isn’t helping you do that, have the conversation. Leaders worthy of the title should want to help their people grow into greater complexity.
Trajectory over titles
The best designers I’ve worked with eventually stop thinking about promotions as checkpoints. They start thinking about trajectory.
They ask:
How can I expand my influence without losing touch with the craft?
How can I create systems that outlive my direct involvement?
How can I shape the environment so others can grow too?
That shift — from chasing recognition to designing systems of impact — is often what triggers the next opportunity.
Promotions follow momentum, momentum follows visibility, and visibility comes from solving real problems at a level of abstraction that no one else is thinking about yet.
Make the next level inevitable
Growth in design leadership rarely arrives on schedule or in the form you expect. It happens when your impact starts to ripple beyond your immediate work — when you stop optimizing for personal advancement and start shaping the systems that let others thrive. The next step up isn’t about proving you deserve a bigger title; it’s about making yourself impossible to ignore by solving problems the organization hasn’t yet learned how to articulate. Titles will follow the trajectory you create — not the other way around.