The more senior the designer, the more abstract the problem they should be solving.
To break it down more tangibly, let’s look at some examples of levels and appropriate responsibilities:
Designer Lvl 1: Design a form that lets people edit their profile. Pretty scoped—assumes there is a profile, and that the solution takes the shape of a form.
Unsurprisingly, hiring friends and former colleagues was by far the biggest channel. This also in part explains why multi-time founders, and anyone with a large network (e.g. Y Combinator), have an advantage:
“All of our early hires were friends/ex-coworkers.”
“First hires were practically all former colleagues. Several people who worked with me in
Google is a great example of how the internet enabled scale and speed: every page on the web returned in an instant. But increasingly, we’re seeing this scale is at odds with a fundamental human need: relevance. Someone who wants to find the best freelance designer, or the best sushi restaurant, or the best NFT to buy... See more