The Design Career Playbook

The IBM Design Career Playbook is the essential resource for design careers at IBM, a cultural artifact and landmark reflecting the maturity of design as a profession in at IBM.

The playbook provides career guidance for formally-trained designers and design managers across brand, product, services, and operations organizations at IBM, which is home to one of the largest enterprise design populations in the world.

This long-form digital experience offers a point-of-view for design specialties like UX Design, Visual Design, Design Research, Content Design, and more. It illuminates the career progression for designers, and outlines expected scope of responsibility and skills for designers at every level, while also communicating the business value of design leadership. It enables designers in effective ways to grow collaborative design skills, evaluate their current career progress, facilitate healthy career conversations, build their portfolios, and envision long-term career paths.

Learn more about the Design Career Playbook release as well as how IBM Security transforms teamwork with a T on Medium.

User need

The Design Career Playbook was created to serve these needs of our design community:

• Designers needed information about the design career paths and specialties available at IBM, whether content design, UX design, service design, industrial design, design research, visual design, and how to grow their skills in these areas.
• Designers needed a fundamental understanding of what the path to career progression looks like at IBM. There had already been a well-established path to career progression in engineering roles, and this project would carve that out for designers. They needed to gain an understanding of what is expected at each level of their career at a company-wide scale.
• They needed a formal understanding of what leadership programs and the scope of responsibility of design leaders are at IBM. They needed resources to help them envision a path to leadership.

Our goal

The goal of the Design Career Playbook is to define, mature, and grow design as a profession in the context of IBM and the world. From an HR and growth perspective, we sought to set up and maintain a healthy technical pipeline of design leaders and a parallel career track to that of Distinguished Engineers.

Our hill statement:

• Unify cross-business design career framework Designers across product, iX, and GBS share a single career framework that equips them to reliably evaluate their current skills and envision compelling future roles and opportunities at IBM.

The team

This playbook was built by the Designer Success team, who drew from various paper resources and early models. The team was small but mighty, consisting of a team lead/coauthor, a content designer/coauthor, a front-end developer (me), a visual designer, and a researcher. We also leaned on executive sponsorship and support.

Contribution

As the front-end developer on this project, I collaborated with the designers on my team to figure out what was achievable by our release date. Initially, I chose to use NextJs to built out the site because of familiarity of the framework and I knew because some of our existing properties was using it, it would be the quickest path to to success. The site is super content heavy, so I leaned on my content and visual designers a lot to help design a site that people wouldn't mind looking at for extended periods of time. This project really pushed me with custom styling. At the time, IBM hadn't settled on Carbon as its design system so a lot of what we built was from scratch. In 2020, I was able to port over all the existing content to GatsbyJS using Carbon's Gatsby Theme to keep the content more inline with IBM's Design Language, which is what you're seeing in videos and screen shots. This site is hosted on the IBM CIO Hybrid Cloud, OpenShift.

Impact

This playbook has impacted 2,500+ formally-trained product, services, and brand designers + design leaders at IBM. It’s been visited by 10,000 IBMers since its launch in December of 2018 with over 23K sessions.

The playbook is featured in IBM Design onboarding programs and is the top career resource and one of the most visited resources for designers at IBM.

Long-term, this has helped establish a permanent formal pathway of designers and design leadership at the IBM company and is a landmark indicative of a mature enterprise design organization.