Young, better, and beaten

If you have less than 5 years of experience and your work (execution, cleverness, speed, influence) is better than those with 10 years in the team, all career frameworks/ladders are designed for you to fail. The interpretation of experience in all companies is age, not work done in a year. "Keep doing the good stuff but you need more wins" is a template answer that HR coaches managers before performance cycles to handle high agency, skilled, and short experience cases like yours. Too young to be in power is an unspoken filter applied during calibrations.

Realization of your value, your visibility in the org, or the maturity with which you communicate has nothing to do with this. Management has a fixed quota to pitch for promotions during each cycle. A person with 3 good projects in 10 years always takes priority over someone with 2 good projects in less than 5 years as they are considered "safe to promote". Sr. / Staff Designer with less than 5 years of experience disturbs team entropy if you also have Sr. / Staff Designers with 10 years of experience. Justifying your expedited move to that level to the rest of the team (especially people who have been around for longer than you) is a difficult conversation no manager wants to have. People also have ego issues reporting to someone of the same age or younger (which makes them look inferior).

To manage these emotions while controlling attrition, you'll often observe a specific someone in your team, someone as good but probably older, suddenly getting all the shiny projects — that's your manager working on their promo case for the next cycle so they can create space for your promo in the next to next cycle while maintaining the divide that makes the older talent feel good about themselves. To manage your expectations for a while, they'll pick the tinniest things you didn't do right in the year (which at another time would be easily overlooked) and lower your rating. Except, you, being ambitious with your timeline, triggered by the unfairness, decide to leave before your promo case is picked. I've seen different versions of this in my career so far. It's neither yours nor your manager's fault. They probably went through the same, couldn't reinvent, and ended up following the procedure they too hate. At their level, the team is more important than the individual. And you aren't wrong for looking after yourself either.

Hence, you'll observe that to manage these career optics, people often go from IC5 in a big company to IC6 or 7 in a smaller one (headcount-wise) with no reasonable bump in salary. Big fish in a small pond. Do I recommend that having done it once? Not for money. Everyone should work in smaller teams for reasons like velocity, less presentations, more shipping, more control, fewer bullshiters, etc. Not because "I got a promotion here that a bigger company denied me". That is my opinion. What you choose also depends on your need to be loved — there is no right approach.

For those reasons, continuing with my line of thought, I'd suggest becoming the best in your team and focusing on the highest bidder if you are in the 23-28 age group. Money is more useful than appreciation. It's clean. Less politics. And it's a secret, so no difficult conversations for your manager with other teammates. However, HR can be your enemy if compa ratios are strongly enforced in your organization. In this case, you can look for a new employer that provides you with disparity. (Equality works by capping the ceiling for the better, driven, and persistent to create a leveled ground for the unserious. Why create a leveled ground for the unserious? You need both thinkers and those who can carry the bricks to build a castle.) Understand the game and what you can control, and play it on your terms.

So, to conclude, trying to move from IC4 to IC6-7 with around 5 years of experience is wanting the man/woman who doesn't want you back in big teams. You'll be urged to try harder, become the best version of yourself, have all the different skills, and that still won't change a thing because you are playing against time. If your team is small, under 12 people (or an org size under 500-1000), you can easily work 12 hours a day and bulldoze your way to a promo. But that might not pay well. The day I realized this, I lost all interest in these status games. They are unproductive. They make you play people and don't improve your core skillset. People I've seen walk this path became incompetent and later weaponized the same. I don't want that for myself. Which often makes me think employment is the wrong way and that I've looked at that for long enough now.

The system's rigged. There are a lot of things you are above and a lot of things that are above you. Endure. Grow. Then, set new rules. Enjoying the work you do while you figure this out makes it a lot easier in the end. After all, that's why you want power, right? To be able to do the things you want, your way.