Catt Small

Cohort 2 - Oct 2024

Cohort 3 - Feb 2025

Cohort 1 - Aug 2024

Cohort 4 - May 2025

Cohort 6 - Jan 2026

Cohort 5 - Aug 2025

Drowning in meetings and tactical pixel-pushing? You need to regain control of your time so you can do more of the work that matters. Use this free set of tools to identify opportunities to clean up your calendar, create focus time blocks, and improve at estimating your work. You'll have more time to do more strategic design thinking and set better expectations with cross-functional partners. Enter your email below to get free printable worksheets and a spreadsheet that is free to copy.

Make space to do vision work

Build a robust toolkit of techniques to level up your influence, scale your impact, & show value as a design leader without direct authority

Staff Designer: Influence & Lead as an Individual Contributor

Senior Product Designer

Product Designer 

Staff Product Designer 

Sr Product Designer

Product Designer

Identify and navigate the roadblocks that keep most senior designers from getting to the next level — with guidance from someone who's been there. I'm a Staff Product Designer with years of hands-on, high-impact leadership at both small and large companies. I've been on a journey as a hands-on designer these past 15 years with lots of bumps in the road, including surpassing these challenges: 🙃 Struggling to understand why I'd been stuck at senior for years 🙃 Fighting for influence over product and design strategy, but still being left out of the room 🙃 Swimming in a sea of role ambiguity as a Staff Designer 🙃 Being overwhelmed with design busywork and not having time to impact the company's vision 🙃 Trying out management multiple times; liking the leadership and mentorship parts, but not the HR part After reaching a place of clarity in my own design career, I decided to create this course to help others reach the same point. Through a series of digital lessons and live conversations, you'll discover techniques and tactics to become a more impactful, influential, and strategic individual contributor and leader. This course was designed for you to get the most possible value from your live time with me. You'll connect with designers from across the industry and build a shared understanding of the role of a Staff+ designer. I've given over 150 designers the tools to navigate their own challenges and reap all the career rewards. Let's work together to chart your path forward with confidence. Join the next cohort today!

Stop being a paintbrush, start being a visioner

Course syllabus

Connect with your peers and talk shop in small, donut-style group conversations. This optional, social experience will not be recorded.

Social Mixer

Learn directly from Catt through in-depth lectures with immediately applicable tactics. These lessons are pre-recorded and split into reasonable chunks you can consume each week.

Digital Lessons

Pop into live sessions to ask questions about the lessons and workshop problems with Catt and your peers. These discussions will not be recorded — what happens in the room stays in the room.

Jam Time

Course format

Staff and Principal Designers who need new tactics to shift from reactive to proactive, build more leadership skills, and influence strategy

Senior Designers who want to get promoted to Staff — or learn about the role before choosing between individual contributor (IC) and Manager

Design Leads, Managers, and Directors shifting back to hands-on IC work who want to know how their skills translate

If you're one of these, this is the course is for you:

In this course, you'll learn to:

Define the role itself, discuss common responsibilities at companies of different scales, and identify the qualities that distinguish a Staff+ Designer from a Senior one. Build confidence to choose between the Staff+ path and Design Management.

Clarify expectations of a Staff+ Designer

Gain influence at your organization without a Manager or Director title. Level up your executive communication skills. Work across teams to positively impact your company's vision and roadmap at scale.

Influence strategy as a non-manager

Set boundaries and manage time effectively so you can make the space to do more strategic design work in a sustainable way (instead of getting stuck in tactical work or endless meetings).

Shift from reactive to proactive

Articulate the value of this role to executives at companies where it doesn't exist and build out the individual contributor career ladder. Show the impact Staff+ Designers have on experience quality through craft — and business success through innovation.

Advocate for the Staff+ Designer role

Push past what's holding you back from reaching the Staff level or succeeding in the role.

Identify and fill your own gaps

Unblock Your Design Career: Reach the Staff Level in 2025

Staff product designer with 14+ YOE at Etsy, Asana, SoundCloud, & more.

You'll learn the differences between senior and staff, along with key gaps managers often see but ICs don't.

Common issues blocking senior designers from reaching staff

Resources to strengthen your individual contributor leadership toolkit and prepare yourself to excel at the next level.

Methods to overcome your gaps and unlock the next level

Personal experiences from a designer who overcame the same career block you're facing.

How someone just like you went from senior to staff

Ship it sooner: How product teams get more done in less time

The upsides of processes and tools, and when to focus on them with your team.

Why and when process can help your team

Build the muscle to unstuck your team and get more done rather than getting caught up in the process.

How to make less plans for plans

Focus on what matters with your direct collaborators.

Join with your team and learn together

Time management for designers: carve out more time to create

Make space on your calendar to complete more strategic projects — within your normal working hours.

Get out of meetings and into the zone

Stop doing tactical work and start designing more holistically for a longer-term impact.

Work on what matters

Estimate your output so you can better negotiate time and priority of projects with cross-functional partners.

Catt Small

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