senior designers aren't necessarily better at design

Senior designers aren't necessarily better at design. They're just more comfortable saying, "we probably shouldn't build this."

When you're starting out, someone gives you a problem and your instinct is to solve it well. You open Figma, explore a few directions, and try to make the thing better. That's natural. You want to prove that you can execute.

But after you've worked on enough products, you start questioning the brief itself.

I've seen designers spend days trying to make a complicated flow feel simpler when the better answer was to remove half the flow. The interesting part is that both approaches require design thinking, but only one of them actually solves the underlying problem.

Why are we doing this in the first place?

At some point, you stop asking "how do we make this work?" and start asking "why are we doing this in the first place?"

Sometimes there's a good answer. Sometimes there isn't. And when there isn't, that's usually where the conversation gets interesting.

This is probably the biggest difference I've noticed between less experienced and more experienced designers. It's not that one person knows more UI patterns or is faster in Figma. It's that experience gives you enough context to question whether the problem is worth solving before spending time on the solution.

Requirements aren't automatically features

It also changes how you work with product and engineering.

A requirement doesn't have to automatically become a feature. A request doesn't have to automatically become a screen. Sometimes the most useful thing a designer can do is push back and ask what we're actually trying to achieve.

That can be uncomfortable, especially when a team has already decided what it wants to build. But designing something nobody needs is still a bad design decision, no matter how good the interface looks.

Some of the best design work I've been part of never made it into the product. Not because we couldn't design it. Because we decided not to build it.

And honestly, that's probably one of the harder things to learn as a designer.