A design career is a progression from thin markers to fat markers.

When you’re starting out, someone else gives you direction. You’re expected to fill in the details using very fine lines. To do so, you must understand the characteristics of the materials you’re representing on the paper, whether they be code, words, images, or bricks.

Once you’ve mastered the details, you can graduate to Sharpies. You can’t get too granular with Sharpies. This is good since it allows you to focus on the relationships between elements without getting lost in the details. You now understand how things can fit together locally. You can also identify, define, and convey patterns that allow designers with finer markers to work faster.

Eventually, you move up to whiteboard markers. With these blunt tools, you explore systemic issues: how elements relate to each other at the highest levels, how the outside world interacts with the system, how the system will evolve resiliently, who is responsible for what. You do this with collaborators in real-time; this includes stakeholders with concerns that are very different than yours. You develop gravitas and political savvy. At the whiteboard, you have an audience, and the stakes are high.

This audience includes designers wielding Sharpies and fine markers. Now you’re the one giving direction. As the person wielding the fat marker, it’s your responsibility to nurture the people using markers finer than yours, so they move on to fatter markers. You must also bring in new people to take up the fine markers others have left behind.

And what if you’re a team of one? Then you must keep markers of varying widths at hand. You must know which work best in which conditions, and when you need to switch pens. (You must still work on the gravitas and political savvy, by the way.)

You can’t design exclusively using whiteboard markers any more than you can with only fine markers. You need a combination of both. Good design managers help their teams master their skills and broaden their perspectives, and keep a vibrant mix of line widths in play. As a leader, you don’t necessarily stop being a practitioner; you just move on to a fatter marker.