“lead”
Appeared in 43% of designer job listings the week of 2026-11-02 (37 of 86 postings).
First tracked 2026-04-13 · 21 weeks of collected data · peak prevalence 62% · no data collected Jul 27 – Sep 27
“lead” prevalence in designer JDs, by week
2026-04-13 → 2026-11-02% of each week's designer postings that mention this term · 21 collected weeks · peak 62% · 31 earlier weeks from before collection began not shown · hatched rows: no data collected, not 0%
Where the conversation happens
View as table
| Role | Total mentions |
|---|---|
| Senior Product Designer | 1024 |
| Design Lead | 709 |
| Staff Product Designer | 525 |
| Design Engineer | 322 |
| Principal Product Designer | 210 |
| Product Designer | 160 |
| UX Designer | 89 |
| UX Researcher | 83 |
| AI Product Designer | 55 |
| Design Systems Engineer | 45 |
| Product Design Manager | 41 |
| Design Director | 37 |
| Growth Designer | 34 |
| Content Designer | 30 |
| Head of Design | 28 |
| UX Writer | 18 |
| Brand Designer | 9 |
| Associate Product Designer | 3 |
| Junior Product Designer | 3 |
Roles where “lead” appears most
Ranked by share of the role's active listings that include this term. Roles with fewer than 20 active listings are left out.
- Design Lead98% · 250 of 256 listings · 745 mentions
- Product Design Manager80% · 35 of 44 listings · 66 mentions
- Design Director70% · 40 of 57 listings · 83 mentions
- Principal Product Designer67% · 129 of 192 listings · 229 mentions
- Staff Product Designer57% · 393 of 687 listings · 602 mentions
- UX Researcher56% · 116 of 208 listings · 144 mentions
- Growth Designer46% · 37 of 80 listings · 57 mentions
- Senior Product Designer45% · 747 of 1,657 listings · 1,086 mentions
- Design Systems Engineer36% · 33 of 92 listings · 47 mentions
- Content Designer29% · 31 of 107 listings · 43 mentions
About this tracker
Every active designer listing in our corpus is tokenized: HTML stripped, stopwords (common English words + job-posting boilerplate) removed, pure numbers dropped. The remaining tokens are bucketed into Monday-anchored weeks based on when each listing was first seen. Counts are weekly totals across every listing for that week. A week only counts as collected if our LinkedIn scrape (about 80% of volume) ran that week; weeks when it didn't are shown hatched as gaps, never as zeros.