The Career Lattice
#046: Why the future of design careers looks more like a network than a ladder. Part 6 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 6: The Career Lattice
Part 7: Write Your Career Vision
Part 8: Filters, Skills, and Your Influence Network
Part 9: Your Career OS Is a Living System
For most of us, the career ladder is so obvious it’s almost invisible. Junior designer, mid-level designer, senior designer, maybe staff, maybe director, maybe VP. One direction. Keep climbing.
I spent most of my twenties and thirties not questioning it. At Ahold Delhaize, there was a clear rung structure, and climbing it felt like winning. But somewhere in my early forties, I started noticing something: the people I most admired weren’t necessarily the ones furthest up the ladder. Some had stepped off it entirely. Some had built something sideways. Some had refused to let the ladder be the only measure of success.
That realization — that there might be more than one shape a design career could take — changed how I thought about the next decade.
The ladder assumes one thing: more authority, more pay, more visibility equals more fulfillment. But what if that math doesn’t work for you? What if climbing toward management feels like moving away from the work you actually want to do? What if you don’t want one job so much as you want to stitch together a bunch of things that matter to you?
That’s where the lattice comes in.
A lattice isn’t a ladder. It’s a network of paths, some of them horizontal, some vertical, some diagonal. Some paths overlap. Some cross. You can move through it according to what you actually want — not according to a predetermined sequence. The lattice is about career optionality: having more than one way to design your work life.
Why alternative models matter right now
Three reasons, all of them practical.
First: resilience. If your salary depends on one employer, one role, one market, you’re fragile. When the market shifts — and it does, constantly — you’re exposed. But if your income comes from teaching a course, a fractional role, client work, and selling a product you built, losing one stream doesn’t crater you. You adapt.
Second: autonomy. This one’s personal for me. I’ve been in roles where every decision had to go through five layers of approval. Where a simple idea took six months to ship. Where I spent more time in meetings explaining why I wanted to do something than I spent actually doing it. That’s not resilience. That’s slow-motion frustration.
A lattice career lets you own more of that. You pick your clients. You choose your collaborators. You set your hours. You decide what you’re building next.
Third: alignment. Most designers got into this work because we care — about people, about systems, about making things better. But the longer you stay in this field, the harder it becomes to ignore the contradiction at its core: you care about impact, but you’re building features for a product that nobody needed. Or solving problems for people you’ll never meet, in contexts that don’t matter to you.
A lattice career lets you say no to that. You can chase missions that resonate. You can choose clients and causes you actually believe in. You can stop waiting for alignment and build it into your structure.
The four paths
Not all of these will appeal to you. That’s the point.
1. Co-ops & Collectives
This is the worker-owned model. A group of designers forms a cooperative, shares ownership, makes decisions democratically, and splits the profit. The risk is shared. The reward is shared. The example I think about most is Design Action Collective — designers pooling their skills to serve nonprofits and social enterprises that otherwise couldn’t afford design work.
The upside: you control your work, your culture, your values. You’re not answerable to investors or shareholders.
The downside: you have to be good at the parts of business that aren’t design — sales, accounting, conflict resolution. Cooperatives are harder to scale. And if a partner leaves, everything gets complicated fast.
2. Fractional & Portfolio Careers
You’re not an employee anywhere. You’re a designer-entrepreneur who stitches together multiple revenue streams.
You might work as fractional head of design for two or three startups, each getting 10-15 hours a week. You teach a course on design strategy. You build and sell digital products. You write. You consult on the side.
The example I know best: a former design director I worked with who decided that climbing the VP ladder wasn’t her thing. She now serves as fractional design lead for two early-stage companies, teaches a course at a local university, and is building a SaaS product for design teams. She makes more money than she did as a director, has way more autonomy, and hasn’t been in a useless all-hands meeting in three years.
The upside: you design your own schedule, your income is diversified, you’re not bored.
The downside: you’re juggling. Marketing yourself takes energy. There’s no safety net — no health insurance from an employer, no 401k match, no built-in community. You have to be disciplined about money.
3. Tool-Building
You identify something designers need and you build it. A Figma plugin. A template system. A process framework. A course.
Look at Steve Ruiz. He started building tools for design. Now Tldraw is a real company with customers and revenue. Or take any designer who’s built a successful course and realized they can make more teaching than designing.
The upside: if it works, it scales. You’re not trading hours for dollars the same way. You can build once and sell many times. You own the asset.
The downside: it takes serious energy to get it off the ground, and there’s no guarantee it will. You’ll spend a lot of time on stuff that doesn’t ship.
4. Education & Public Writing
You become the expert voice. You teach, you write, you speak at conferences, you build a platform.
Jared Spool did this. So did so many designers who realized their real value wasn’t in one product — it was in helping other designers get better.
The upside: you scale your impact. Your ideas reach people you’ll never meet. You build a following that becomes its own kind of leverage and opportunity.
The downside: you have to be comfortable with visibility, with being critiqued, with the grind of consistent output. Not everyone wants their career to be public.
The lattice is yours to shape
Here’s what matters: these paths aren’t mutually exclusive. You might blend them. You might spend two years doing fractional work while building a tool on the side, then shift to teaching. You might start in a co-op and eventually go solo. The lattice moves with you.
Exploring alternatives isn’t about rejecting traditional employment. It’s about having more options. It’s about not defaulting into the ladder just because it’s there.
The question I’ve been sitting with for the last few years: What would I choose if I weren’t climbing anything?
And that’s the question worth asking yourself too.
Your turn:
Pick one of these four paths that feels even slightly interesting to you. What attracts you about it? What concerns you? What’s one small step you could take in the next 30 days to explore it — not commit, just explore? Maybe it’s a conversation with someone doing it. Maybe it’s an hour of research. Maybe it’s just writing down what’s appealing about it.
The lattice only exists if you start to see it.