Picture this: a junior designer, two years into her role at a promising SaaS company, staring blankly at a modal redesign. It’s not complex work—a simple adjustment to a CTA, a few words trimmed from the copy. Thirty minutes, tops, for someone who knows the ropes. But she’s stuck, paralyzed, for three hours. She tries a layout, deletes it. Tries another, deletes it. Eventually, a Slack message goes out to the senior designer: “Can you look at this when you have a sec?”
The senior walks over, glances, and in four minutes, solves it. “Just move the CTA up and cut the copy in half. Like this.” The junior nods, “Oh. Yeah. That’s obvious.” This wasn’t an isolated incident; it happened multiple times a week. After two years of watching someone else consistently solve her problems, she developed imposter syndrome, not because she was incapable, but because she’d been effectively trained to believe she wasn’t good enough.
Eighteen months in, the senior designer quit, citing a lack of challenge. The company had spent $330,000 over those two years. When the senior left, the junior was exactly as capable as on day one – perhaps even less so, now utterly paralyzed to make decisions alone. They were back to square one, but with a significantly larger hole in their budget and a team unable to function. Sound familiar?
The Industry’s “Senior-Only” Worship: A Recipe for Dependency
The design industry, it seems, has developed an unhealthy obsession with seniority. Scroll through job boards, and you’ll see demands for “7+ years experience.” Agencies proudly pitch their “senior teams.” Conference speakers are invariably “senior design leads” or “VPs of Product Design.” We’ve inadvertently created a culture where anything less than a senior title feels like settling, like second-best.
This obsession isn’t just about ego; it’s systematically undermining companies. It creates organizations that are utterly reliant on expensive external brains. Not because senior designers aren’t brilliant—they absolutely are. But because this worship prevents internal teams, from juniors to product managers, from ever developing independent judgment. It fosters an environment where design thinking is seen as a specialized, inaccessible skill, rather than a collaborative capability.
At the company with the stalled junior, even the product manager struggled with basic UX calls after two years alongside senior designers. Developers waited for pixel-perfect mockups rather than thinking through interaction flows themselves. When I asked the junior why she didn’t just try solving a navigation problem, her response was telling: “What if I get it wrong? We have senior designers for this.” They had, unwittingly, trained their entire team that design decisions require expert validation, effectively renting someone else’s brain while teaching their own team they didn’t have one to use.
Rented Excellence Isn’t Capability, It’s Learned Helplessness
Here’s the harsh truth: companies are being slowly strangled by teams that never learn to make design decisions without explicit permission or validation. That SaaS company, for all its “senior design leadership,” couldn’t ship a simple feature after three years. Not because their product was inherently complex, but because they had outsourced all their design thinking. Their internal capability was actively degenerating.
Renting excellence doesn’t supplement your team; it replaces their brain. Every time that senior designer swooped in to fix a UX issue, the junior learned a critical lesson: wait for the expert. Don’t think through problems yourself. Don’t experiment. Don’t make a decision. This isn’t just about the eye-watering $330,000 spent over two years. The true, crippling cost is a team trained to believe that design decisions aren’t theirs to make, leading to a profound sense of learned helplessness.
Building True Design Capability: A Different Path
Now, consider a different scenario. Another company found themselves in a similar bind when their senior designer quit. But they couldn’t afford to simply replace them with another high-priced senior. Instead, they took a strategic pivot. They hired a capable mid-level designer at $85,000 annually and brought in a senior design advisor for three hours a week at $12,000 annually. Their total cost? $97,000. Less than a third of the previous company’s outlay.
The results were transformative. The mid-level designer immediately started making real decisions. Yes, some were wrong initially, but the advisor was there to catch them, to explain the “why” in fifteen-minute focused sessions. This wasn’t passive observation; it was learning by doing. Within three weeks, a navigation decision went awry; the advisor explained the principles. By week eight, a similar problem arose, and the mid-level nailed it. Four months in, she was making navigation calls independently. A year later, she was competently handling work that, just six months prior, would have required senior input.
What’s critical here is the incentive structure. The advisor, working with five companies for a few hours each, stays sharp because they only tackle complex, challenging problems. Their success isn’t tied to making a company dependent; it’s tied to seeing the mid-level outgrow the need for constant input. This model shifts from hiring seniors to “fix” problems to hiring them to “teach” and enable internal growth. It’s the difference between patching a leak and building a stronger pipe.
Are You Building or Just Renting? Three Crucial Questions
Want to know if your company is falling into the “senior designer addiction” trap? Ask yourself these three revealing questions:
- Is your team making more decisions independently over time? If your product manager still can’t make basic UX calls after six months with a senior designer, you’re renting decisions, not building judgment. Your team’s design muscles aren’t getting stronger.
- Can your team ship a feature competently without external design input? Not perfectly—competently. If the answer is no after a year of “senior design leadership,” you’ve engineered dependency, not capability.
- What happens when your senior designer takes vacation? If work grinds to a halt, or critical decisions are postponed until their return, you don’t have a design team. You have expensive external brain dependency.
The first SaaS company from our opening anecdote failed all three of these tests, even after 18 months and $240,000 spent. Zero internal capability built. The second company, with the mid-level plus advisor model, was passing all three by month six. The contrast couldn’t be starker.
The Real Stakes: Capability vs. Perpetual Dependency
This isn’t just about saving money, although the cost savings are substantial. It’s fundamentally about whether you build design as a core organizational capability or remain perpetually dependent on renting other people’s brains. Company A, the one where the junior went to therapy, cycled through three senior designers in two years. Each departure meant work ground to a halt for six weeks or more because no one else could make critical decisions. Two years later, they still struggle to ship a basic settings page without external help.
Company B, with its mid-level plus advisor model, shipped the same settings page in nine days. The mid-level made the decisions, the advisor signed off in one focused session. But the impact went deeper: their entire product team began to think about design. PMs started catching UX issues early, developers questioned interaction patterns, and the mid-level designer made confident, informed calls. Company B didn’t have “better” seniors; they built design thinking into their team’s DNA by empowering people to make real decisions with expert backup.
If you’re hiring seniors to fix everything, you’ll always be broken. If you hire to teach, to mentor, and to empower, you build an organization that stays sharp and self-sufficient. You’re not choosing between senior and mid-level designers. You’re choosing between building a compounding capability that grows with your company and renting excellence that evaporates the moment someone walks out the door. The design industry may have convinced you that “senior-only” equates to quality, but what it often creates is companies that can’t think without permission, costing them far more than just money.
