Jenny Wen, Design Lead at Anthropic put it plainly: "I think shipping is a skill. And I think right now in the way that we work, people either have it or they don't." The industry just didn't value shipping as much in the past, she says, but that era is over. The ability to ship something good is what she considers the baseline now.

Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify agrees that craft is the starting point. He wants to see that you can produce design that "looks wonderful." But once that's established, he's really screening for curiosity. Do you transfer context from one domain to another? Do you bring unexpected references? Do you exercise curiosity "in a very active way"? The designers who stand out to him are the ones who are constantly pulling from new places and applying what they learn.

Simon Corry, Sr. Director of Product Design at Ramp is looking for that same curiosity. "That natural curiosity, that fun in the details, that's what I'm looking for," he says. Great designers ask probing questions. They want to understand the why behind the change, not just the what. At Ramp, curiosity isn't a nice-to-have. It's what separates designers who thrive from those who stall.

Dylan Babbs, Co-Founder & CTO at Profound takes it a step further and breaks the whole thing into a framework: visual design, product design, and design engineering. "You can no longer just be a designer that does one thing," he says. At Profound, every designer has at least two of those three. The expectation is growing across the industry. Can you make it look wonderful, design for the business, and actually build it? Two out of three is the floor.

Xiulung Choy, Head of Design at Graphite lands in a similar place. There's "continued value in just being really great visual problem solvers," he says, but if you're designing software, "it's really critical for you to understand how that software is built." The best designers, he argues, can do both.

Arjun Mahesh, Head of Design at Hebbia offers one final piece of advice. After everything these leaders have said - ship, stay curious, build, maintain a high bar for craft - there's still one more thing a designer can do... start a podcast.