What Do the Best Designers Want From a Job?

Henry Modisett says the best designers want ownership, trust, and accountability from a job.

He hires and keeps people by working backward from talent. Ask why a great designer left the last job, or what makes the current one worth staying for, and the answer does not look like management at most companies. People left because they were asked to become a manager when they were individual contributors, or because they landed on a team with five other designers stuck on the same problem. The best designers want hard problems, they want to own those problems, they want to be trusted to figure the work out, and they want to be held accountable for impact. They want that from each other, not only from a manager. A very experienced designer whom everyone looks up to can end up isolated, so mutual trust matters as much as a manager trusting the maker.