Schema Practice — Design Frameworks and Career Growth
This directory collects frameworks Schema Education uses internally to think about design practice, team composition, career growth, and design work in the age of AI. These are not rules — they are lenses for surfacing assumptions, reducing team friction, and having more precise conversations about how and why we design the way we do. All frameworks are authored by Marco Morales unless otherwise noted.
Contents
| File | What it documents |
|---|---|
01-three-types-of-designers.md | Morales' original framework for categorizing designer modes by training background: Agile, Agency, and Academic |
02-agentic-designer.md | A proposed fourth mode — the Agentic Designer — operating at a meta-level above the original three through AI orchestration |
03-scope-ladder.md | The Design Scope Ladder: how choices, patterns, practices, and leadership differ across Execution, Systems, and Strategy scope — with a 3×3 table showing how the three modes apply at each level |
04-pm-competency-framework.md | Product Manager competency framework: L1–L7 expectations across Scope & Influence, Getting Stuff Done, Technical Skills, and Collaboration |
05-designer-competency-framework.md | Product Designer competency framework: L1–L7 expectations across Customer Discovery, Agile Design Delivery, Flexible Design Toolkit, and Collaboration — with documented connections to the Three Types and Scope Ladder frameworks |
Why This Directory Exists
Schema works across teams with mixed design backgrounds. Without a shared vocabulary for design modes, differences in process preference get misread as incompetence, laziness, or stubbornness. Naming the modes turns coordination problems into solvable ones — and makes interviews, project scoping, and feedback conversations significantly more precise.
The 2025–2026 AI tools landscape has also created a genuinely new kind of design practice that existing frameworks don't capture. Practitioners who work primarily through AI delegation and orchestration are doing something qualitatively different from any of the original three modes. Documenting that difference early is how Schema stays ahead of the vocabulary that the broader industry is still trying to find.
How to Use These Frameworks
- Use the three-types framework during team-building and project kickoff to surface assumptions about process speed, structure, and method selection
- Use the agentic-designer framework when evaluating candidates for AI-adjacent roles, scoping AI-augmented projects, or assessing team AI readiness
- These frameworks are synthesis tools, not evaluation rubrics — use them to start conversations, not end them
A note on methodology: The frameworks in this directory are original syntheses by Marco Morales, informed by published UX and design thinking literature but not directly validated by peer-reviewed research. They are practitioner frameworks. Sources are cited where they support or complicate the claims — not as validation of the frameworks as wholes.