Coaching and Growing Young Designers: From T to Y
When we coach young designers, we’re not just teaching them the craft of design, we’re helping them shape the trajectory of their careers. Two models can help frame this journey: the T-shaped employee and what I like to call the Y-shaped path.
The T-Shaped Designer
The T-shape has become a well-established metaphor in design and business.
The vertical stroke represents depth: a strong craft specialty, such as interaction design, research, or visual design.
The horizontal stroke represents breadth: the ability to collaborate across disciplines, understand adjacent skills like business strategy or engineering, and speak the language of stakeholders.
As coaches, we want to nurture both. Too much depth without breadth, and designers risk becoming siloed experts. Too much breadth without depth, and they risk being generalists without craft authority. The healthiest growth balances the two.
The Y-Shaped Path
But the T only tells part of the story. Once designers have some years of experience and their craft begins to solidify, they often face a career inflection point—what I think of as a Y-shaped path.
One branch is the individual contributor (IC) path. Here, designers continue deepening craft, growing into senior, principal, or staff roles. Their influence expands through thought leadership, mentoring, and raising the quality bar.
The other branch is the people manager path. Designers here move into leadership roles, focusing less on pushing pixels themselves and more on coaching, building teams, and shaping culture.
Both branches are valuable, and both require different mindsets. As mentors and leaders, it’s our job to help young designers explore both, understand what motivates them, and give them the space to experiment before they commit.
Coaching Along the Way
Expose them to breadth early: Rotate projects, let them shadow research, strategy, and dev.
Help them find depth: Encourage them to fall in love with a craft specialty while keeping perspective.
Talk about the Y openly: Many young designers don’t realize that design leadership isn’t only about managing people.
Model both paths: Share stories of IC leaders and people managers so they can see different kinds of success.
The Same but Different Canvas
The T and the Y are complementary. One frames skills, the other frames trajectory. Together, they form a canvas that helps designers see themselves not just as workers filling roles, but as professionals making intentional choices about who they want to become.
Our responsibility as coaches is to help them draw that canvas with clarity, confidence, and courage.