This is a reality check post. Gear up.
If you're an industrial designer or a mechanical design engineer at a hardware startup, this post is for you.
Imagine this. You're a couple of years to seven, eight years into the industry as an ID or a DE, and you ship products, get good reviews too for your work. Now, if I ask you, what have you designed in the last year that nobody ask you for? You'll likely go silent because of a common reason, "too much project load!" It's likely that your sketchbook hasn't been opened since college and in the name of CMF, you'd have just a couple of Pinterest boards for the work projects you worked on. Product teardowns? You may have watched a bunch of them, opened a couple of devices at work but nothing more.
There will come a time when you'll want a promotion based on delivery of a finished product and I'll come back to why that isn't evidence but the bigger problem needs to be called out first. You've handed your growth to a project staffing decision. You choose to get better exactly as fast as the project deadline makes you, and not a step more. That's not career building.
I mean just take out your phone and see your photo gallery from the last thirty days. You'll likely not find photos of products, parts, materials, details that you'd captured by stopping somewhere to 'think' products, right?
Or, do you have recent CAD files where you've practiced making different things outside your work project? Or, have you gotten any product at home where you took it apart with a screwdriver?
What do you know today deeply about your craft that you didn't before you joined that nobody at work taught you? If your answer is a podcast or YouTube video, or books that's just consumption, not applied knowledge.
Feeling over-confident enough to not spend sleepless nights on up-skilling just because a product launched doesn't imply personal growth. It's the product manager, project manager, your counterparts, the science lab heads, the suppliers, the tooling vendors, firmware engineers, plus a hundred decisions you weren't in the room for.
Delivery of a product proves that the team worked but it doesn't prove anything about whether you got better. So there's no real point in romanticising yourself.
The reality is that if you're not doing something for your craft every single day that nobody asked you to do, you're mediocre. If you are not mediocre today, you'll soon be. It's the state of being where one only does work that's assigned.
Now, you'll hear "practise more, sketch more" often but that's pretty useless because you haven't done anything about these. Also because laziness is typically never the problem, it's the fact that nothing in your week shows that you're not improving your sketching skills, or that you're not practicing your craft more.
Start by asking good questions to yourself and maybe they help. Questions like if you had a second resume without company names or company's product names, what would you write in core-competencies that you couldn't write there a year ago? If the page is empty, you have identified that gap.
Questions like, if you were to hypothetically own a product outside work that someone can review honestly, with deadlines, how would you perform? Can you document a teardown (watching videos and blogs don't count) in utmost detail every month?
Can you design the same part with improved mechanics, surfacing, renders, etc. faster and better every week? Do you have a personal library of materials, swatches that are labelled for relevant references today (twelve of them for every year of experience)?
And there are a lot more things that you could be asking around not doing frequent factory trips, proactively joining review calls or tooling review calls, and so on. None of these are in the bucket of "practice more," but these questions make you realise the gaps. These gaps, hopefully, should move you to do better.
If you're not doing this daily, it's fine too. Plenty of people don't do these daily. Just don't call it ambition. And don't be surprised when the title (and eventually, growth) doesn't come.