The design industry is broken. These design coaches want to fix it

By most external factors, Renda Morton had a successful career in design. In the late 2000s, she co-founded the design studio Rumors where she and the team worked on identities, websites, and books for a range of clients. She joined The New York Times as a designer in 2012, eventually becoming the paper’s Vice President of Design before moving to California to lead product design at Dropbox in 2018.

But in late 2020, in the midst of COVID-19, she started to experience a burnout. The challenges of managing a team remotely and the unexpected loss of a parent forced her to question why she was doing this. So in 2022, she and her partner left their jobs to figure out what was next. “Let’s redesign our lives and figure out where work fits instead of the other way around,” is how she described this process to me. They spent time traveling and thinking about what they wanted, both in work and in life.

Since February of last year, Morton, who now lives in New Mexico, has been working as a career coach. “I realized that I didn’t really care about the product we were designing,” she says, reflecting on working in tech. “But what I really cared about were the people I worked with.” Her job in design leadership, she realized, was less about designing and more about the people she was with: mentoring them, helping them do their best work, and finding balance in an increasingly uncertain moment. She now works with clients, mostly in design and around the design world—designers, engineers, product managers—who need help navigating their careers, from small decisions like trying to get that next promotion to bigger shifts like moving states or changing jobs.

The move from designer to career coach might read, at first, like a big jump, but Morton is not alone. Amy Santee, a former designer researcher at eBay who is now a coach, maintains a public directory of coaches for people in the UX industry that runs nearly ten pages (at least two dozen are specifically listed as coaches for designers). As coaching as a field has grown in popularity—especially around Silicon Valley—designers, at the top of their careers, are increasingly making the transition into coaching work.

It used to be that designers who had worked their way to the top might go and found a startup or jump to a bigger company. Now, some are setting out on their own to help coach the next generation of designers. Many of these designers, after becoming managers themselves, turn what they’ve learned into books for others. Julie Zhuo, a former design executive at Facebook, recently published The Making of a Manager, for example. When John Maeda was president of RISD, he wrote a book too, called Redesigning Leadership.

Among the names on Santee’s list, there are coaches who previously worked at companies like Meta, Shopify, and Mailchimp. “When I set up shop as a coach, there were maybe four other people doing something similar,” says Santee, who transitioned into coaching in mid-2020. “Now it feels like there’s an entire industry around providing coaching for people in design.”

Therapy, but for your professional life

Broadly, coaching might look similar to speaking to a therapist. People pay for one-on-one sessions, sometimes booking a single one-hour session to work through a specific issue, for example, and other times booking a set, maybe a month’s worth, or six one-hour sessions. This can run, on average, anywhere from a few hundred dollars a session to a few thousand for a multi-session package. Most of the time, people hire a coach to solve a specific problem or issue in their career: feeling undervalued, trying to get a promotion, feeling burnt out.

“For me, coaching is about partnering with someone on a goal they want to achieve, or helping them make a big change in their life by getting clear on not only what that change should be, but why it’s important. A big part of it involves imagining possible futures and making sure clients feel good about the direction they’re taking,” Santee says. “I’m there to support them as they achieve clarity and insight, knowing that the person is the one responsible for achieving that goal.”

Santee, who studied anthropology before finding herself in various design research roles, defines herself as both a coach and a strategist, noting those often require different skills. “I’m a strategist when I’m making suggestions for specific things to do to be successful in your job search, for example,” she says. “But coaching comes into play when you’re struggling with confidence and we can find ways to work on that.” For Santee, coaching is a way to draw on a wide range of skills she’s acquired across her career. “Coaching is also a creative project,” she says.

Morton approaches it similarly, triangulating coaching between consulting, therapy, and mentorship: “I’m not giving explicit advice. I’m not asking them to talk about their childhoods. I’m not telling them about what I did when I was in that situation,” she says. “But I am helping them figure out the right solutions to the problem in front of them.” In this sense, coaching can sound like a type of design for your career or your life. It’s just another problem to be solved.

Designing your life

Morton says that design terminology often overlaps with the structure of coaching. “I found coaching and design to be very similar. When I started my coaching training, I realized this was like a design process, but for yourself, your life,” she told me. “It’s about asking what’s the real problem here? It’s a lot of brainstorming, creativity, and taking action. In design, we might call it prototyping and testing.”

In fact, this is the message of Bill Burnett and Dave Evan’s bestselling 2011 book, straight-forwardly titled, Designing Your Life. Burnett and Evans, the Executive Director and Product Design Lecturer, respectively, of the design program at Stanford, blend design thinking methodologies with the language of self-help so that anyone (yes, you!) can design a better life for themselves. They write about how reframing problems, developing processes, getting feedback, and maintaining a bias for action—things they say designers do well—helps one create a well-designed life. The success of the book led the two to start Designing Your Life, a “global movement” that includes coaching, certifications, workshops, and two more books: Designing Your New Work Life and The Designing Your Life Workbook.

It’s tempting to view this as design thinking gone too far; the design world’s version of influencers creating content to sell you the promise of a better life. Where designers once focused on the creation of objects—products, logos, buildings—design thinking often proposes thinking about the entire system, giving the designer great autonomy over the process and turning any problem into a design problem.

What if we stop, not just at redesigning our products, our apps, or our cities, but go all the way to redesigning our careers, or even our entire lives? Unlike becoming a therapist, one doesn’t need any licensing to call themselves a coach. You can go through specific training, but it’s not a prerequisite. In a recent essay for The New York Times Magazine about the rise of career coaches in Silicon Valley, Daniel Duane writes that “coaches are radically undertrained and self-anointed.” This makes the transition easy: anyone, with a bit of confidence and gumption, could become a coach.

But I think this raises bigger, more structural questions: how can so many designers become coaches, creating, in essence, an entirely new industry? And perhaps more importantly—why do so many designers feel like they need a coach? The demand is creating the supply. When I asked Santee how the coaching industry could sustain itself, she had a blunt assessment of the design industry: “Because nobody wants to fucking do this anymore.”

Helping people do what they love

James Victore, a designer-turned-coach (he prefers the word “teacher”), describes his work as helping “people get paid to do what they love.” This comes from personal experience. When he started designing book covers in the early 1990s, he describes trying to design book covers that “looked like book covers.” “I moved to New York and wanted to become the best poster designer, so I did work that I thought would get me hired, that I thought the editors would like,” he says. “And then I started making some money and realized I had my own opinions. I had something else that I wanted to say and I could put that into the work.” He built a body of work that reflected his own interests better; he now has work in the permanent collection at MoMA.

As he was building his studio, Victore was also teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he taught for 20 years. After he left, he wanted to continue teaching and began running workshops and giving public lectures about creativity and the creative process. He started a popular YouTube series, Burning Questions, where viewers could send in questions about navigating creative work. As the COVID-19 pandemic dried up opportunities to speak, he began offering one-on-one coaching sessions. He begins the engagement with a client with a questionnaire asking, in his summary, “what made you weird as a kid?”

Victore thinks the creative industries have lost sight of the individual voice. “Design has turned professional,” he says. “When students get to school, they already have a preconceived notion of what design is and looks like. But it’s just a shoebox of cliches. When you take creativity and mix it with commerce, those interests can be antithetical.”

All of the coaches I spoke with echoed this: It’s easy to lose sight of why you wanted to get into this work in the first place. “It’s hard to be born creative and want to sing your song when everyone else is telling you how to work,” Victore says. “So much of what I’m doing is helping people with confidence, with voice, with finding where they fit in.”

Morton draws a loose comparison to the rise of factories during the industrial revolution, which came with safety issues and working conditions that would make people sick. “There is something about these knowledge worker jobs that are detrimental in similar ways that we can’t quite see,” she says. There’s another metaphor to draw between the factories and the modern designer too: as the systems grow in complexity, the work gets fragmented with designers working on increasingly smaller parts of the product as if on a modern assembly line. In this way, it’s no surprise the rise of career coaching occurs as there is renewed interest in tech labor unions. One is a personal response and the other structural, but they are speaking to the same condition: the industry is broken.

While designers in tech are often better paid than designers in other industries, the designer’s role is often another cog in the wheel that’s subject to the swift reorganizations and change in direction from the top. Designers become disconnected from the product they are designing for, designing increasingly smaller parts of larger systems.

A growth at all-costs mindsets means a product is designed for maximum profit instead of user needs. And as tech companies have slowly taken over the design industry, these roles have become more competitive, drawing applicants from across design, engineering, and research. It has forced designers to be constantly looking for the next thing, the new promotion, the bigger company to stay in the game. “Burnout is real. Not finding value in your work is real. The emotional labor from the continual re-orgs is real,” Morton continues. “It’s not human.”

“Coaching gives me this opportunity to catalyze change at the individual level, but also at a broader scale in a way. The impact is cumulative in that it doesn’t end with a single conversation or 6-month coaching engagement,” Santee says. “The individual, internal change within my clients that comes from adopting practices of self research and self advocacy within their lives and at work, mushrooms into an ongoing collective empowerment and impact.”

It’s an optimistic vision. What would a design industry look like that favored the human over the product, individuality over trends, creativity over commerce? The irony is that designers already have a term for that: human-centered.