Why do Talented Senior Designers Plateau?

I interviewed 30 design leaders to understand why some Seniors make the jump past Senior while others, doing equally strong work, stay stuck.

The leaders I spoke to were Heads of Design, Principals, and VPs at Target, Mastercard, Centene, Salesforce, Estée Lauder, and Zalando, plus design-led startups and mid-sized SaaS companies.

The answer wasn't craft. It wasn't tool fluency. It was about what they were choosing to communicate about, and how they translated design work into the language the business runs on.

Download the brief for the three patterns that separate the designers who advance, plus a readiness diagnostic for each one you can run on last quarter's work.