Advisor · Direct & Advisethe field as your team

Level 6 has no defined level above it within most organisations, which is what makes it terminal. That does not mean practitioners stop working. On the IC track the title is Design Advisor, Distinguished Designer, or Design Fellow. On the management track it is Chief Design Officer or Senior Vice President of Design. The defining verb is Direct & Advise: the field is your team, and your work reaches the scale of the discipline or the enterprise rather than any single organisation’s function.

The Design Advisor’s influence has externalised beyond any single employer. They write, speak, teach, define methods, advise multiple organisations, and often hold named positions on industry bodies, educational institutions, or non-profit boards. Their output is the shape of the discipline itself over decades: the frameworks that get adopted, the standards that get codified, the methods that become the taught canon for the next generation. The role is rare. Most organisations have zero Design Advisors, and those who exist often hold their position through a combination of organisational role and independent public practice.

The Chief Design Officer is the executive design leader at enterprise scale. They sit on the company’s executive committee, report to the CEO, and are responsible for design’s strategic contribution to the business as a whole, across product, brand, communications, and sometimes physical environment. Their peers are no longer other design leaders. They are the CFO, the CTO, the head of the business. The work is largely translating between design and the rest of the executive function in ways that make design a strategic input rather than a service.