Jenny Wen, Design Lead at Anthropic thinks shipping is the new core skill - one that designers either have or they don't. The ability to actually ship something good is what she considers the baseline now.

Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify states clearly 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. The designers who stand out to him are the ones who are constantly asking questions, pulling from new references, and applying what they learn.

Simon Corry, Sr. Director of Product Design at Ramp is also looking for that same curiosity. "That natural curiosity, that fun in the details, that's what I'm looking for," he says. The great designers ask probing questions and want to understand.

Dylan Babbs, Co-Founder & CTO at Profound views design excellence through a 3-part 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 to have at least two of those three.

Xiulung Choy, Head of Design at Graphite maintains that there's "continued value in being really great visual problem solvers," meaning, design thinking. He continues by saying that if you're designing software, "it's really critical for you to understand how that software is built." The best designers, he argues, can span both design thinking and technical competence.

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.