It's quite common to reach out for advices in DM. When you’re early in your career, you look upward for answers. You look for people who seem to have it all figured out. The design head at your dream company, the speaker at that design conference, or that one designer on Twitter who makes every post sound like a revelation. You assume they must know something you don’t. So you reach out for advice. What you usually get back is either no-response, or wisdom, but rarely actionable guidance.
They’ll tell you things like “follow your curiosity,” “build taste,” or “trust the process.” None of it is wrong, but it’s useless without real context. You can’t apply altitude thinking to ground-level problems you're facing on a given day.
Every level in the ladder changes what reality looks like. When you’re a junior designer, your problems are more practical. Be it finding the right tools, defending or justifying your designs, understanding what “good” means when you’re surrounded by people better than you. When you’re a design lead, the problems shift entirely. You're now selling design, struggling with hiring, managing time & energy, and probably trying to influence culture. Advice from the top rarely crosses that gap cleanly. The view is different.
That’s the altitude problem. People who’ve been doing this for 10–15 years have internalised a different environment. They’ve forgotten what it feels like to design under pressure for stakeholders who don’t know what UX means. They’ve forgotten how it feels to be the youngest person in the room, terrified to say, “I don’t know.” They mean well, but they no longer remember what the climb felt like. So they give you conclusions instead of instructions. Conclusions end up sounding too meta!
Look, advice has a shelf life. What worked in 2015, when design was still fighting for a seat at the table in India, doesn’t work in 2025 when every startup has a design system, and AI tools are gaining traction in daily workflows. “Focus on craft” was useful when portfolios were static. Today, craft without speed is a real liability. “Don’t worry about business” made sense when product decisions were founder-driven. Today, designers who can’t speak metrics either don’t get invited to meetings or get pulled-in at a hyper-execution stage.
The problem isn’t that experienced people are wrong. It’s that their timeline doesn’t match yours. Advice is time-sensitive; it expires as the environment evolves. The best advice often comes from people who’ve just crossed the stage you’re standing on. People who are 2–3 years ahead of you, not 10. They still remember the chaos. Their battle wounds are fresh. Their solutions are still imperfect but improving. They’ll tell you what actually works right now.
I’ve noticed this pattern repeatedly at work. When junior designers at Native reach out to me directly, I try to answer, but I can feel the altitude difference. I’m often thinking about org design, roadmap alignment, and brand consistency. Their reality is about how to get time from a design engineer or how to convince R&D or other stakeholders to not change a requirement last minute. My advice is technically correct but rarely helpful in the moment. Then I see them ask someone slightly senior. Someone who's a mid-level designer who just solved that same (or similar) issue last quarter and the conversation suddenly lands. It’s faster, more actionable, more empathetic. The timing is right.
We romanticise experience, but someone who designed for web apps for 10 years may not understand the complexity of designing for multi-modal AI tools. Someone who led big teams may not remember the survival tactics of an individual contributor juggling 10 screens a day.
I’ve also seen how this plays out in everyday bad advice. “Good design speaks for itself.” Not when your work goes through 10 stakeholders. “Push pixels until it feels right.” Worked on Dribbble years ago, not on systems with 100 screens with different use cases. Even career advice suffers from the same misfit. “Find your niche” (too early and you kill exploration, too late and you spread thin), “Work smarter, not harder” (usually said by people who already worked too hard), “Networking is everything” (true, but only after you’ve built something worth showing).
The pattern continues in life. “Follow your passion.” True if your passion can survive boredom and tedious mundane daily grind. “Take risks.” In reality, easy to say when you already have money in the bank. “Don’t compare yourself to others.” This kind of advice feels comforting, but it often removes accountability. Think about it. It tells you what to think, not what to do next.
Design, especially in India, is full of first-generation builders. Many of us don’t have senior designers at home or mentors who’ve done this for decades. We learn by looking sideways, not upward. Peer groups, Slack channels, and really small design communities often do more for growth than mentorship programs or conference talks. The people a few steps ahead are still in the grind. That’s why they can actually help.
If you’re a young designer reading this, stop looking only for the “Design Head” or “Director” to guide you. Find someone one role ahead. The internet has made it easier to look too high too soon. You can follow every design leader, read every book, listen to every podcast, and still feel lost. Because none of them are living your timeline. You don’t need more philosophy. You don't need advice from someone who's already 'successful' but need to find folks who are simply a few steps ahead of you.