A Designer’s Path: Agency vs Product

If you’re a budding designer or thinking about breaking into the field, it can be daunting. There’s so many things to think about -- how do you prep for an interview? How do you set up your portfolio? What can you expect out of a design exercise? What about salary and benefits, how do you make sure you’re paid fairly? While those are all topics worthy of their own posts, I want to back up and highlight two fairly common paths designers take: product and agency. My hope is to shed light on these two very different career paths so that you can decide which one might fit your early career goals better.

In-House Product Designer

Product designers that go this route belong to an in-house design team. In-house product designers work with other internal teams to build a single product or single suite of products that are owned by the company.

Structure

Depending on the size and maturity of the design practice, there may be multiple teams of designers and multiple layers of reporting, potentially laddering up to the CXO (Chief Experience Officer), or CPO (Chief Product Officer). There could be multiple designers or even multiple teams of designers working on a single product. Typically designers will be organized to work closely with each other as well as peers in product management and development, likely on a daily basis.

Strategy & Operations

In-house designers get to go deep in a specific product area, and may even focus on the same area for years! To do so, designers need to employ a full design process (for example the double diamond design process) to creatively come up with solutions to solve the user’s problems. This may include doing user research or working closely with a research team, building on knowledge that exists through other design work, and building solutions that fit within a cohesive system.

To maintain cohesion, many product orgs have design principles, style guides, and design systems that allow designers to choose pre-existing building blocks to build up their solution from. Often designers won’t have to start from scratch and with a mature design system, the focus is more on solving the problem vs spending time pixel pushing. There will likely be an expectation to help maintain or contribute to the design system as new patterns and styles emerge.

Why Choose This?

As an in-house designer, you will be deeply embedded in the core teams that build the product. As a result, you will get to know the product’s users deeply and the longer you stay at a company, the deeper you get into that user’s world in terms of understanding their needs and goals. Your body of work will be in the same domain but may tackle different problems within that. The rewards are plentiful: you see firsthand how your work is being used, how well it solves the problem you set out to solve, and the company’s success as a result. You also build valuable relationships with the various internal teams that you work with. Your career trajectory as a designer usually involves becoming more strategic in using design as a product differentiator first as an individual contributor, and then perhaps as a people leader.

Why Wouldn’t You Choose This?

If you know you’re already the type that thrives on having multiple projects on the go and they’re all completely different, you might actually find an in-house team too focused on one thing. As a result you might get bored!

You’ll also find on more mature teams that you may actually feel limited in terms of “creativity.” I caveat this because obviously creativity comes in so many different forms, and you will definitely need to flex some creative muscles in problem solving. However some designers really want to be able to throw in that latest design trend or really push the envelope in visual aesthetics. You may feel limited when there’s an established design system in place, or you need to maintain consistency with other parts of the company’s offering.

Agency Designer

Another path that is quite popular is to join an agency. Agencies are organizations of creatives that are hired by other companies to do design work. These can range from short one-off projects to longer term engagements, and you would likely be working with a mix of team members from the client and team members from your agency.

Structure & Operations

Agency teams are generally quite fluid -- they will assemble teams quickly to meet the needs of a client and spin them down as their need on the project comes to a close. I’ve heard of designers working on multiple engagements at a time as well. Agencies have a concept of “bench time” -- the time a billable resource is not on a project. Resource Managers work really hard to minimize bench time across all consultants. As a result, designers are shuttled from project to project as soon as they come off one.

Because of the varied needs of clients, it’s really difficult to predict what projects are in the pipeline, and who may be on that project. But because of this variability, designers are exposed to lots of different industries, working styles, organizations and teams. They may need to constantly swap between multiple client projects throughout your workweek.

Strategy

Agencies are usually hired when a company doesn’t have the skills or capacity internally to complete an important project, or if leadership just wants some new ideas. If it’s the skills or fresh ideas that are missing from the project, agency teams have the opportunity to really flex their out-of-the-box thinking. Some agencies might specialize in an area, like e-commerce, because the bulk of their engagements have been in that vertical and they can bring current trends from those past projects.

Why You Might Want To Choose an Agency Job

If you crave diversity in your work because you get bored easily, the agency route might be for you. You’ll be working on multiple projects at the same time, and none of them will have anything to do with each other. With every new client you have a chance to iterate on past ideas or take a completely different approach. One positive result of this is that your portfolio will fill up with projects very quickly, and the breadth of your body of work will quickly ramp up, even as a junior designer.

Another great reason to choose this route is that you get exposed to a lot of clients, and you can treat these engagements as “trial runs.” Of course it wouldn’t be exactly the same experience as working on an internal team, but you get a really good sense of their industry, how they operate, and key players within the organization. Since you may get exposed to quite a few clients over the course of your time at an agency, you may find one that you want to work at permanently. This happens quite often where past consultants end up coming back to old clients (after a no-poach clause has expired of course) for a permanent role since the relationship has already been established.

Why You Wouldn’t Want an Agency Job

Typically agencies are hired in to finish a job -- the project has already been drawn up and lines up with the overall strategy of the company. Because of this, agency teams tilt more towards execution as opposed to being strategic. For a designer, this likely means that there is little room for research or helping shape the problem that’s being tackled. If these are skills you want to develop, it might be hard to find clients willing to go back to the beginning of their product cycle when you start on the project.

If you also enjoy seeing how your product does in real users hands and getting direct feedback and measurement, you may find this lacking. Agency teams often close out their engagements when a project is delivered -- this maybe when something goes live to real users if you’re lucky. But likely a client won’t be paying for an agency to wait around while they gather feedback. Sometimes agency designers are done when the client has signed off on design specs -- in this case the designers don’t even get to work with developers to build the actual product! By the time the product has shipped there might be changes the designers had no control over or decisions made in their absence.

I’m Generalizing…

Of course I’m generalizing based on my own experiences: trends I’ve seen in the industry, conversations with peers and potential job candidates. There are obviously exceptions to every rule: there are in-house product teams where designers work across tons of varied projects concurrently with no research, and there are agency designers building out design strategy for a multi-year client, and deeply embedded in their product process.

But hopefully shedding light on these two often disparate design career paths is useful, as one might appeal to you more than the other. Remember, nothing is permanent! There’s no reason you can’t start in an agency, and then switch to a product company, or vice versa. But when you’re looking for your first role, just remember to target your messaging, resume, portfolio and other job seeking materials for the role you’re pursuing -- they’ll be looking for like minded candidates.