Design leaders’ careers and place in the world of technology has changed and it’s not going to come back. It’s time for us to adapt to new demands and new opportunities. This is our reckoning.

What businesses need from design leaders has changed. Today’s tech market does not have the same appetite for elaborate design thinking practices, as demonstrated by the fortunes of design thinking pioneers IDEO. At 2023’s Leading Design conference Teak Tse, from Sky, vividly captured the collective mood, by referring to the double diamond as “triggering for stakeholders”. In the first half of 2024 more than 70% of advertised design leadership roles now require a demonstration of ‘craft skills’ and a ‘portfolio of design work’, even when leading teams of >50.

You may have noticed the number of books, articles and events aimed at folks leading design teams has reduced, in recent years. A quick scroll through LinkedIn may not provide the same numbers of exciting new techniques than it used to and you may have noticed the lack of new leadership jobs being posted. Instead you may have also noticed an increase in posts regarding burnout, career switching and layoffs.

It appears the discipline of managing design teams is in “the trough of disillusionment”. It’s time for our design leadership community to move on, to let go of our firmly held beliefs, challenge ourselves and embrace the new realms of our collective value.

Post mortem

What happened? Why has the discipline of design leadership suffered? To help us understand the way forwards, we can asses what fuelled these changes.

There have been key moments in the evolution of product design and therefore design leadership

1. Wild west. It’s apps. It’s social media. It’s responsive design. With the boom of a new tech market, we developed fast. We created a million iterations of our job titles and businesses tried to place design in a dizzying range of reporting lines.
2. Oh I’m a manager!? Excitement grew as ICs were thrown into manager roles. Kristen Skinner wrote the book and taught us how to organise design teams. The Leading design conference launched. Julie Zhou blogged it all. We learned. We shared. We built communities.
3. Reaching burnout. This is hard. Design has a seat at the table. Demand for design thinking and design leadership reaches its peak. Market mobility sores as design leaders average just 18 months in role, across the tech industry.
4. Leading in a pandemic. The great forcing function. Some markets grew as the world changed and others came to a halt. As design leaders we had to figure out how to do our jobs remotely. We changed our hiring and managing tools. But as the world started to open up, a return to office fuelled the “great resignation”.
5. The downturn. It’s bad all over. As the global economy shifted, venture capital slowed and mass layoffs swept through tech. Musk took over Twitter, gutted its product team and business leaders took notes. Google shuts down ‘moonshoot’ factory.

As a result of these ups and downs three key changes emerged.

The UX stack collapsed.

As design teams got smaller and smaller, the discipline stack collapsed. Teams merged. Leaders were asked to take on a broader remits. Content design, research and design have been drawn together under one banner. Specialist disciplines such as design strategists, prototypers, motion designers have blended into generalist design positions.

Markets got fierce.

As more and more SaaS products flood the market, the barriers to entry is becoming lower in all markets. The challenge/threat from disruptors is now higher than ever as large, slow moving teams struggle to adapt quickly to new channels, funnels and user expectations. Speed-to-market and efficiency is vital to survival.

AI has arrived.

After years of fear, speculation and expectation, general artificial intelligence has hit the mainstream. The design community is now facing a world where tools are readily available for anyone to quickly synthesise research findings, generate ideas, create content and edit images.

The new design leadership

Which brings us right up to today. This rise and fall of the tech product industry has lead us to our crucible moment. Product designers, content designers, researchers and those who lead these disciplines, now face a new future.

So let’s take a look at 5 survival tips for thriving in the new design leadership:

1. Increase your adaptability

Org changes, priority changes, tech changes, funding changes, we’ve seen it all. The ability to change, adapt and continue is now a key attribute for all design leaders. Successful design leaders can’t die on every hill and wage a war every time a process or strategy shifts. Equanimity is your new superpower. In the same way we once abandoned old style choices (skeuomorphic anyone?) and rushed towards new styles, we will all need to be happy letting go of methods we once fought for.

Survival tip : Ask yourself; are fighting to hang on to any methods or practices? if so, how might you achieve the same quality level, without them?

2. Learn to play out of position

Alongside adaptability is the increased need to ship. Because our markets are fiercer the design leaders role will continue to have fuzzy edges. To thrive in tech, a design leader needs to be happy playing out of position to get sh*t done. We need to enter the chat when it comes to product priorities, tech decisions and marketing strategy. In this slimmed down tech market, there is no room for fiefdoms.

Survival tip : Get a tech lead to give you a dummies guide to your architecture. Attend Product’s prioritisation sessions. Join the Product Marketing all-hands. Start building your point-of-view beyond design.

3. Round out your UX leadership

Over the past few years I’ve interviewed, mentored and surveyed a broad spectrum of design leaders. From new managers to high-level executives. To date, I have yet to meet a single design leader who didn’t start as an individual contributor. It’s normal to hold a bias towards the discipline we came from, however with a collapsed discipline stack and increasing amounts of AI powered tech, we need good content design and research more than ever, so work to round out your cross discipline leadership.

Survival tip : Create a goal to prioritise your learning. A good start point would be to read Stephanie’s book on UX Research and Rachel’s book on leading content design.

4. Experiment with new workflows.

We are back into a learning phase. As we become more adaptable, play out of position and round out our leadership, we have the opportunity to explore new tools and develop new design methods. To support our businesses moving as fast as the competition we need to explore new ways of working.

Ask hard questions of your workflow, such as ‘does every project need a discovery phase?’ or ‘does each update needs to be an A/B test?’. The same can be applied to the tools you give your team, so ask yourself ‘is there a tool that can automate this?’.

Survival tip : Find opportunities to speed up your workflows by exploring new tools. Are you fully aware of the baked in AI features in Figma, Miro and Slack?

5. Become a product connoisseur.

When business leaders look for ‘craft skills’ in design leaders this does not necessarily mean we should be jumping into Figma and taking control. However, it does mean being able to clearly articulate an expert level opinion on design.

One of the most effective ways to establish yourself as a connoisseur of product design, is to build a practice of actively seeking out new apps, services and products and regularly bringing your observations back to your team.

Making it part of your job to share examples of good UI, interaction and content design with your team is a simple method for establishing a quality bar and demonstrating your knowledge, without undermining your team’s skills.

Survival tip : Set a quarterly reminder to download the top 3 apps each month. Take a grab of any interesting elements and share them with your team.

I believe we can all still enjoy fruitful careers leading design teams, but it won’t look the same. Many of the day-to-day operations will remain, but the paradigm and stakes are different. The new path will be an exciting mix of shape-shifting and solid foundations. I believe this is one of the most exciting and important eras for our community.

For more guidance on design leadership, check out Design Leaders Studio. It’s an online course, created to support designers taking their first steps into leadership.

Leading a high functioning design team is never a solo endeavour. It requires good cross-team relationships, because good design can’t happen in a vacuum. The best designers in the world can’t flourish without good support. For good design to happen it must be supported by good marketing, good technology, good product management, good pricing etc

To that end a successful design team must not stand alone inside an organisation. To ensure your team thrives your role as a design leader is to form deep connections with the surrounding organisation. There are some interesting case studies, models and methodologies for this kind of deep integration that we can learn from.

Integrating your design team

No matter how big your hiring budget or how highly design is represented in your business, there is no practical way to assign a designer to every corner of your organisation.

In truth there are many aspects of businesses that can benefit from the use of design thinking but you and your team can’t be everywhere at all times. If your team does build momentum and your success is noticed around the organisation, you will be increasing demand. Without sharing methods and developing skills outside of your team the strength of design will be limited.

For a business to become design orientated, the business needs more people who understand, appreciate and extol the value of design. So the goal of a design leader is mass adoption of a design-orientated culture.

Driving design adoption

No matter how big your hiring budget or how highly design is represented in your business, there is no practical way to assign a designer to every corner of your organisation.

In truth there are many aspects of businesses that can benefit from the use of design thinking but you and your team can’t be everywhere at all times. If your team does build momentum and your success is noticed around the organisation, you will be increasing demand. Without sharing methods and developing skills outside of your team the strength of design will be limited.

For a business to become design orientated, the business needs more people who understand, appreciate and extol design. So the goal of a design leader is mass adoption of design methods.

What we can learn from open source methods

When looking for examples of successful integration and adoption models you’d be hard pressed to find a stronger, more lasting example than open source software.

So let’s take a look at the principles that drive open source software development:

• Peer review: Because the source code is freely accessible code is actively checked and improved by peers.
• Transparency: Open source software allows users to check and track changes and progress.
• Continuity: Open source code outlives its original authors because it is constantly updated through active open standards.
• Flexibility: Because of its emphasis on modification, you can take your open source code anywhere, and use it for anything, at anytime.
• Open collaboration: The existence of an open source community means that you can find help, resources, and perspectives that reach beyond your group.

Note: these principles are not universal, because they’re open source and constantly evolving!

How to apply open source to design leadership

How might we take the principles of open source technology and apply them directly to building and running product design teams?

A good place to start is by asking the following questions

1. Peer review: Are you and your team openly inviting design feedback from your tech, product and marketing team members? As a design leader are you regularly seeking feedback, from your peers, on how your team operates?
2. Transparency: Do you openly share your goals with your team? Do you send regular updates to your design team on how you’re tracking against your goals?
3. Continuity: When you are absent does your team still function efficiently? Can you confidently delegate?
4. Flexibility: Is your team setup to change quickly? Are you able to swap team members around or shift the emphasis of work without mass disruption?
5. Open collaboration: Are you sharing your learnings internally and externally?

All of these questions lead to potential methods for evaluating and optimising your design team. Many of the answers can be applied to simple, practical methods for a more open and integrated team. For example:

Methods to ‘open source’ your design team

• Design out in the open with regular broadcasts of work-in-progress to your peers in tech, marketing, product, sales etc
• Share your quarterly goals with your team and your progress against them.
• Build advocates by inviting peers to spend time with your team for example, add a product lead to one of your design reviews or bring a tech lead into one of your team meetings. Give them the insight to share across the org for you.
• Don’t be afraid of giving other teams access to your template files. By opening up access to your tools, you can start to enable others to repeat activities and use design thinking tools in their work.
• Build guidelines for others to achieve basic levels of design thinking, without you and your team holding the pen.
• Schedule regular 1:1s with product, tech and marketing managers and use a standard set of questions to draw insights. They are the users of your design team and you need their feedback to optimise your teams’ processes.
• Experiment with ceremonies and tools from other teams. If your friends in engineering have a different method for kicking off projects, why not try it out on your team?

In conclusion

At its heart, the open source movement is a community and it’s a community of practice, which is built on collaboration and inclusivity. It would appear that the open source principles can be used to model high performing and happy teams. When your success (as a design leader) is based on the output, behaviours and attitudes of your team, then finding and applying tangental models can be a powerful shortcut to greater impact.

For more guidance on design leadership, check out Design Leaders Studio. It’s an online course, created to support designers taking their first steps into leadership.

When I was searching for design leadership roles, I kept a list of questions to use in interviews. They split neatly into four key areas:

1. The type of role on offer
   Not all head of design roles are created equal
2. The current state of design
   Is this a renovation project or caretaker moment?
3. The overall direction of the org
   Am I joining in war time or peace time?
4. The hiring manager
   Who is the person that will have the most influence over my time here?

I tend to ask most of these in the initial recruitment team call to see if it’s worth exploring any further, but I think it’s also valuable to ask multiple people the same questions to uncover different answers from different seniorities, teams and tenures.

These questions always sit alongside the standard stuff e.g. location, travel, package etc. They have helped me find great roles and avoid some terrible decisions. I hope they’re useful to you too.

1. The type of role on offer

What type of leader is needed? Different types of leaders are needed depending on the many aspects of the where the role came from, why it’s vacant and what expectations have been set. Some HoDs are expected to clean up a team, whilst other HoDs are needed to build a team from scratch. Each type of role will suit a different type of leader. These questions will help you understand what type of role this will be:

Is this a new role? (If so why are you creating it now?
If it’s not new and has someone left, why did they leave?)

This is usually my lead question. It helps me determine if expectations have already been set for the role by someone else.

Is the team in a high growth phase? (If not, is it a reduction/streamlining phase?)

I try to get an early indication of what the core challenge will be inside an organisation. If it’s high growth I will undoubtedly be doing lots of hiring and org design, whereas if its in a streamlining phase, I’ll more than likely be looking for cost savings and cutting back people or processes.

Is this a time of change (e.g. new owners and/or exec team, new direction)?

Has something spurred a change in the org that has lead to the role? When a business has undergone (or is still undergoing) seismic changes there will be lots of choppy waters ahead. Big change can take years to shake out. What you sign up for today may not exist next month — perhaps for the better.

Is this ‘hands on’ or pure management?

Sadly there’s still quite a lot of HoD roles being advertised that expect IC work. In my experience this is usually an indication of low-level design maturity and lack of investment in the design discipline. Player-coach roles are a good stepping stone for new managers, but ultimately not tenable.

2. The current state of design

What is the health of the design org today? I want to know if I’m signing up for a major renovation project or if I’m joining a group with a high functioning team with a grasp on the business benefits of design.

What’s the relationship like with the product, tech, marketing and sales teams?

Hopefully there is a mutual respect between teams, but this question will help me understand if I’m going to be repairing relationships.

Which team has the most influence on design?

I’m looking for red flags with this one. Does the sales or marketing team currently have a heavy hand on the design process and do I want to be the one who challenges this?

Why wasn’t this role filled internally?

I love asking this one to different people around the business. Not only does this gives me an indication of the team’s reputation but it also guides to me on the abilities in the current team.

What’s the biggest challenge the team has faced last year?

Hopefully there is nothing unexpected here. Usual answers may be levels of resource or strategic direction. Tread carefully if the answer is more fundamental e.g. ‘technology’ or ‘relationship with marketing’.

How do you measure the impact of design?

Do they in fact measure the impact of design? If not then you may spend lots of time and energy proving its value around the org.

What does the tech/product leadership want from a design peer?

Again this is a great indicator of the health of the design discipline. In my experience it’s a good sign when the Head of Tech and/or product have clear needs and demands.

3. The overall direction of the org

Am I joining in war time or peace time? There’s lots of crossover with the first area, but here I’m specifically looking for challenges in the business that will shape the HoD role.

What is the path (and time) from a concept to launch?

This is vital for me. I asked this at every interview and strongly advise all designers and design managers to do the same. If the route from design to launch is very long and very complex, buckle up for a frustrating ride.

Is there a Chief Product or Design Officer in the exec team?

Another indicator of the maturity of a business. I personally avoid companies with Chief Digital Officers. In my experience they are legacy players where design plays a minor role.

Who do you count as the biggest competitor?

Is the company leading, chasing or disrupting? This question can help you uncover what kind of environment you’ll be playing in.

Biggest challenge for the business?

Are finances an issue? Is the market shrinking or is some outside influence going to shake the ground the business is built on?

4. The hiring manager

Never forget that interviews are a two-way process. Don’t be afraid to delve into the hiring manager. As a hiring manager, you’d be surprised at how few people ask anything about me or my management style, so I always have some probing questions at hand when I’m the interviewee.

How do you handle stress?

Are you a shit umbrella or a shit funnel?

Tell me about your journey through {company name}?

Have they just started and if so, what’s it been like for them? If they have a long tenure it’s good to know if it has met their ambitions.

If in 3 months time, it’s all gone wrong, what happened?

A nice little ‘pre-mortem’ style question to flesh out expectations and fears.

What does progression look like from here?

I want to know if I do well in this role how it will develop, how they will invest in me and what opportunities could open up for me.

For more guidance on design leadership, check out Design Leaders Studio. It’s an online course, created to support designers taking their first steps into leadership.

Questions to ask in your Head of Design interview was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From design to leadership ⛰️

My path to head of design roles was a pretty standard route from practising designer, to lead designer and then to design team manager. As I transitioned from being a ‘hands on’ designer into a management position I found I was no longer measured on my outputs and that my behaviours, methods and ideas which lead to my previous success, were not easily transferable.

Like lots of designers the tools and techniques that could help me were not immediately obvious to me. I was able to easily find resources to help me hone my design skills and there was no shortage of generic management resources, but I was unable to find much material specific to design management.

Over the years I waded through endless, dry management books and articles on leadership behaviours. I studied material from business, sports and political leaders to help me understand the structures, routines and philosophies that define good leadership.

A lightbulb moment 💡

Early 2020 a friend called me for some advice. They are a highly experienced and skilled designer and were thinking of applying for head of design roles. I tried to outline the basics of design management and give them an overview of how the work would be different — it was a revelation to them. They had imagined being a Head of design was some kind of Tom Ford meets Stanley Kubrick creative dictator position.

This theme continued as I spoke to more designers, listened to other design leaders and considered my own experiences. The gap between designers perception of design leadership and the reality seemed much wider than it should be, with very little available to help anyone learn more.

I decided to create something that brings together all the knowledge I had accumulated on management with my experiences of running design teams and present it in a way that would make sense for designers.

How not to create an online course ✍️

Initially I had planned a course to be delivered in-person over a number of days. I started by planning the course structure and I (inexplicably) set about creating the content in keynote, with each module as a separate file. By the time lockdown hit the UK and the design/tech world flipped to a remote first environment I was already >20 files deep. With a little convincing from my partner I dropped the idea of IRL training and moved towards an online course. In retrospect this would have been a great time to migrate all the content from separate keynote files to one online doc with collaboration features FML.

The most M of all MVPs I could make

Before I invested too much of my time into the content I wanted to test the interest and relevance of my course curriculum. I used a basic google form and sent it out to a small group of designers (10–15) who were considering management roles as their next step.

A cringeworthy Alpha

Once I had a refined content structure I moved on to explore how I could deliver it. I created a janky prototype page on a password protected Wix site. I filmed myself delivering the content, using my iPhone, in my dining room and edited it (poorly) in After Effects.

I leaned on a few friends, plus some volunteers from Triangles to test out the prototype content and give me honest feedback.

In short; my delivery was poor. The feedback told me the content was good, but nobody would pay money for something that looked and sounded this DIY. But it did give me a much better picture of what would be required to produce the content to a standard i was happy with.

The Alpha cost me a total of £40 to produce and yet saved me hundreds in misspent production costs.

The production phase (where the fun runs dry)

I set myself up with a tripod, mic, backdrop, lighting and editing software. Then it was a case of churning through hours of production work.

Over the spring/summer of 2020 I churned through hours of video recording, edited and animated gigabytes of files and came to utterly loathe the sight of myself on camera.

It reminded me of the early days of my career as the most junior member of the design team working through production tasks, while the more senior designers moved on to fun projects.

As the production work came to an end and a launch date came closer the excitement returned. A small (but lovely) group of beta testers helped me iron out the bugs and my use of the teachable platform.

Design leaders studio is now live to the world

Launching and learning 🚀

As I pushed it live and the first courses were sold, my imposter syndrome ran riot. I fully expected everyone to request a refund or for the response to be complete indifference. However the response so far as been heart-warming.

I didn’t create this project as a business venture. I don’t intend for this to become a full-time job. I simply wanted to give something back. My priority has always been to give designers the boost that I didn’t get and help a few people through the difficult transition into design leadership roles. This process has taught me a lot about passion projects and how much harder it can be to remain empathetic when you’re designing for your own needs.

My final learning here remains the challenge of moving quickly when producing content that relates to processes and practices. For example, when I started writing the course material it was focussed on how you lead a team of designers who share a physical space. There have been lots of items along the way that have been revised, but I learned to let go of having my most recent thinking in every aspect of the course.

www.designleaders.studio

Thanks 🙏

Along the way I had lots of great support. I’d like to say particular thanks to:

• Rachel McConnell
• Heldiney Pereira
• Dickon Gray
• Liz Hamburger
• Pete Winchester
• Michael Stanley
• Gianluca Cherubin

Have you ever wondered how someone fills their time when they work in a design team but don’t design anything? Probably something to do with meetings and spreadsheets right? Well let’s take a look at a typical day for a head of product design.

9am : Warming up with email, slack, calendar 📅

My day starts in probably the same way everyone’s does; by picking through the remnants of the previous day and figuring out what’s going on. I check email, slack and my calendar to see what’s happening today and where my focus should be.

9.30am : Check performance with design team sync and 1:1s 🤝

As a design leader I am now measured by the performance of my team. The product I design is the product design team. A team sync and one-to-ones with my direct reports is how I can get a weekly performance check of my team — in the same way a product designer starts off with reviewing the conversion rate, sign up rate, renewal rate or whatever their key metric may be.

The weekly design team sync is a fast-paced run through with each member of the whole design team. So we get top priorities, dependencies and blockers from brand design, UXR, content design and the constituent product design groups. This 30 minute session not only builds a cross-team view for everyone, but importantly it helps maintain a sense of community and subsequently team health.

Following the whole team sync it’s on to one-to-one sessions with my direct reports. Much like the design team sync this is a method to measure team health, but on an individual basis. I’m looking for performance and wellbeing indicators, as well as actions for me to improve team member’s process. Any bigger/longer term items can be picked up in our monthly career sessions.

12.30–1.30pm : Recharge over lunch 🔋

Wherever possible I take the opportunity to leave my desk and ideally the office. If time allows I use this time to drop messages to friends and family, cramming as many emojis as possible 🤓 👍

1.30–2.30pm : Listening to users with leadership updates 🕵️

If the product design team are now the product which I’m responsible for designing, then the tech, product, marketing and sales teams are my users. In the same way a product designer will dedicate time to listening to their users, a design leader must continually monitor for feedback and opportunities from within the organisation. Much like a product standup the leadership updates are fast, functional and designed to make sure our cross-discipline teams are all working well together.

Making sure I’m in-step with the product directors, engineering leads, marketing directors and sales managers allows me to ensure my strategy and my team are supporting the needs of the business and it also gives me a channel to advocate for the needs of the team e.g. more headcount, budget increase, cleaner data from support teams.

2.30–3.30pm : Developing the team with recruitment 🌱

ABR- Always Be Recruiting. Even when you’re not in a growth phase you need to ensure you have a pipeline of talent, not to mention a healthy book of specialists that you can go to for specific skills that may not exist inside your team e.g. illustrators, animators, photographers.

A strong working relationship with the recruitment team is vital to ensure your recruitment process is as efficient and effective as possible. So this time is often split between reviewing applicants, interviewing, researching specialists or writing job specs.

3.30- 5pm : Leading the team with strategy workshops 🗺️

A key indicator of team health is a well understood strategy. As the head of design role forms part of the wider leadership team, this means I have a part to play in the strategy and how it’s communicated across my team. Finding ways to connect the overall company strategy and ‘top-line’ product strategy to the design team is vital. Without a strong sense of purpose and a clear view of how their work contributes to success your team’s health will quickly decline.

A portion of my time is dedicated to designing and facilitating strategy workshops, writing strategy documents or finding ways to communicate those strategies across my team. As strategies rarely stand still, this work becomes an ongoing pursuit, as does tracking against the plan.

5–6pm : Supporting the team with process development ⚙️

I wrap up my day by looping back to my product (my design team) and making sure the end-to-end process is streamlined and powerful. For a design leader the term ‘process’ is a double-sided challenge, as it’s my responsibility to optimise the process by which the team operates e.g. getting data from support teams, running peer reviews, using the best tools as well the process of designing solutions e.g. design thinking techniques, research tactics, UI decisions.

The final part of my day is removing blockers and introducing new techniques. This might be as simple as sharing articles and making suggestions directly to designers, or as complex as working with IT security to implement a new tool for the team.

6pm : Prepping for tomorrow with list making ✅

I’m a note writer. The best way for me to organise my thoughts is to write them down (hence this article). So I wrap up each day with a list of items to tackle tomorrow. That way I can make a smoother start tomorrow.

WTF does this all mean?

All of the tasks I’ve detailed here fit into just three categories. These categories keep the team health and team performance moving forward:

1. People — taking care of your team, inter-team relationships, recruiting etc
2. Process — how your team is working, design methodologies, designops etc
3. Purpose — co-creating strategies, forming design principles, telling the team’s story

The purpose of a practising designer and a design manager is surprisingly similar — a head of design designs the team. The designers design the products.

For more on design leadership and tackling the role of a design manager, check out Design Leaders Studio, an online training course created to support designers taking their first steps into leadership.

WTF does a Head of design do all day? was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When you lead a design team, of any size and shape, it becomes part of your leadership responsibility to develop the talent you have. You must help your designers develop new skills, embrace new experiences as learning opportunities, and imbue a sense of progress. We must do this to push the team’s skills forward and give folks a chance to progress in their careers.

The challenges of using development frameworks

Today most teams fall back on the career development framework. This approach attempts to quantify a mixture of skills, attitudes, and behaviours against an atypical view of the ideal designer.

Anyone who has extensively used a development framework can testify to how tricky they can make conversations. Because of the linear structure, it’s very easy to become fixated on the idea of it being a path from A to B, in order to get a promotion. Development frameworks have a singular route forwards, which also means they tend to just focus on craft skills or mix craft skills up with the skills required to thrive inside an organisation.

Reframing “soft skills” as business maturity

The role of a designer is bigger than the craft of a design. Being a successful designer is more than the ability to produce beautiful interfaces. It requires skills to navigate org structures and establish a place in which good design can exist. No matter how skilled a person may be in designing UI in Figma or building prototypes in Origami, if they can’t articulate their process to their stakeholders, build healthy relationships with their teammates or collaborate with their peers, then the work is unlikely to be accepted by an organisation.

As Jared Spool has pointed out, great design comes from learning to operate successfully inside an organisation and speak the language of the business.

The only way that design leaders will communicate the value of their team's UX design initiatives is to talk to the executives in a language they already understand. To make this happen, design leaders need to think and talk like an executive.https://t.co/0pq8ljaP7Y

For a designer to go beyond beautification and have a meaningful impact, they must understand the needs of the business to the same depth that they understand the needs of the user(s).

For all this talk of getting a seat at the table, designers need to be genuinely *interested* in how the business works.

The skills required to do this are often referred to as ‘soft skills’. In the past these have also been referred to as ‘the business of design’ and the reality is that they are as vital as the craft skills needed to create design solutions. So it’s not unreasonable to consider a designer’s craft maturity alongside their business maturity.

An alternative approach

Regardless if your team is formed around a track for individual contributors and a track for people managers, there is still an interesting new perspective to be gained from drawing a line between craft levels and business levels.

If we take the craft maturity of a designer and the business maturity and plot them on separate scales we can start to build a different - possibly more useful - picture of each designer’s progress.

• Craft maturity would typically include items such as running workshops, UI design, prototyping, customer interviews, hypothesis writing etc
• Business maturity would typically include items such as strategy writing, reputation building or advocacy, reporting/storytelling, relationship building etc

Instead of a framework conversation that moves designers from A to B on a spreadsheet, the conversation now becomes about becoming a balanced designer who is not only able to produce good work, but successfully operate inside an organisation.

If we take this principle and apply it to Jason Mesut’s concept of mapping skills to a shape, then you can see how it stops being a linear journey and a question of balance. Each level within your team (e.g. principal, senior, mid) is now represented by a concentric shape.

By using this approach your role as a leader now becomes developing a more ‘rounded’ approach to each member your team and your designers can understand what is needed to grow inside a team, beyond their craft skills.

As with any personal tracking tools, there is a high degree of nuance and context which managers need to apply, before using these methods. It’s important to recognise that having different shapes can be advantageous to promoting diversity of thought, but probably more important to recognise that every team requires different shapes. The shape that works most effectively in my team, will not work as effectively in yours.

For more information on design leadership and guides to the role of a design manager check out Design Leaders Studio, an online course, created to support designers taking their first steps into leadership.

I recently spent some (lockdown) time learning the basics of haptic feedback design. Having designed lots of UI feedback in the past I wanted to build another layer to my understanding and delve in to the current possibilities with today’s devices.

What are haptics?

Haptic feedback is any physical notification/indication that can be felt by your body. The most common type of haptic response for product designers today are phone and wearable interfaces that notify users, without alerting other people. Sometimes these are used together with audio and visual responses to add an extra layer of richness to the experience. Games designers have been using haptics for many years now within controllers.

Compared to visual and audio cues, haptics are somewhat under utilised by product designers. They have a far more intimate outcome as it is an interaction with a person’s body. Haptics have a subtlety and nuance that presents a fascinating design challenge.

The right response, to the input(s)

First consideration has to be the different inputs. With 3D touch and other pressure inputs, users can provide different inputs to instigate different haptic responses, based on the amount of pressured applied to a surface. The response should be appropriate to the input. In the same way a UI can respond different to hover, focus or press.

Think of animation principles

Designing haptic feedback shares many of the same queues as animation.
You can make small indicators of personality within the design. For example, a wobble or a bounce conveys a different message to a snap or perhaps a fade.

The accents, space and rhythm

Designing haptics is a lot like writing music. The spaces in between ‘notes’ are as important as the notes themselves. Pauses create tension. The rhythm of beats is the underlying sets the tone of the message. Accents can bring attention to tiny moments.

Limited conventions

Today there aren’t the same amount of conventions as we see in UI design and there aren’t the same pre-existing constructs that guide voice interactions, but there are a few basic patterns emerging from hardware designers.

1. Descending patterns often signifies failure
2. Ascending patterns often signifies success
3. Flat, repeating patterns denote progress

Key design decisions

When designing haptic feedback you have three key areas to play in.

1. Rhythm
   Like a knock on your door, small, fast beats feel urgent. Long pauses create tension. Setting the appropriate pace is key.
2. Volume/intensity
   Long beats create instensity, short bursts that increase in length create rising intensity. Consistant beats create a calmer response.
3. Sharpness/timbre
   Clusters of beats are create a less threatening buzz effect as opposed to heavy beats — these are often described as ‘sharper’ and demand attention.

Calm technology principles are vital

Much like designing sounds for UIs, haptics can be distracting. They are an intimate interaction as they engage your sense of touch. Being overly keen to buzz on people’s skin is delicate balance to strike. The principles of calm technology should be carefully adhered to.

Getting started

You can do very basic prototyping in iOS by creating custom haptics, within the sounds/haptics settings. It’s a clunky method, but allows you to test simple ideas on devices.

For more advanced users you can use Vibration app.
Warning: Choose a vibration app carefully, when using a work device or connection. There are lots of vibrator products in the app store! 😳

The design manager role has grown considerably over the past five years. As design has been recognised as a business value-driver and organisations have increased their design maturity, we’ve seen lots more design management roles being created. The design leadership community is now represented by Slack groups, conferences, meetups, content and books that offer support and guidance for navigating the transition from designer to leader. Through all of this material and rhetoric there is one undeniable theme:

Becoming a design manager is really hard

It’s as simple as that. This shit is really difficult.

People are struggling, stressed out, and having to figure out new ways of working. But why is it so hard? There is a growing demand for community support in this field, in a way that isn’t as overt for product management and engineering. I decided to take a look at why our community is calling out for help.

What makes a good designer

Designers often describe their profession as an obsession. Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘the designers' disease’. People often say that it’s not something that can be switched off and once you open your eyes to design, you’ll see it everywhere.

The design community has a tendency to fetishise people like Steve Jobs and Stanley Kubrick and pore over stories about them being entrenched in the minute detail — dedicating hours of their lives worrying about the tiniest (some say insignificant) details. Designers who are willing to go to this level of detail are considered to be good at their craft.

Good designers are often anxious people and their desire to design comes from an underlying need to control. Designers take comfort in making sense where they see a mess, and fixing the things around them.

A working designer has the continual satisfaction of seeing their work out in the world. When I recently asked a group of designers what was the most satisfying part of their jobs, 95% of them said it was ‘seeing an output’. The work of a designer has a visible outcome. A designed solution that, more often than not, will be built/produced and shipped. Thus creating a body of tangible work.

What makes a good manager

Getting painstakingly close to the details and focussing on outputs are not the traits of a good manager. With around 85% of today’s design leaders coming from design practitioner roles, you can see why the switch can prove difficult. In short, the skills that made you a good designer, will not make you a good manager.

The outcome of a recent study by Google, confirmed that a good manager ‘empowers the team instead of micromanaging’. The manager role is no longer responsible for taking care of the micro-level details but is now also measured by the output of their team. The body of work now belongs to the designers in the team, not the manager. Instead, a design manager is responsible for fixing all the invisible problems and messes found between people (e.g. org design, workflow, tools, role definitions).

A designer shifting to a manager role has to shift his/her toolset from Figma and Framer to strategy communication, team reputation and skills development. You will have a wider remit, but less control of the details.

According to Forbes an essential quality of a great leader is decisiveness. Citing that “ bosses who aren’t decisive are often ineffective”. This does not play well with the design philosophy of continual iteration, test and learn cycles and in-depth discovery phases.

The impact of transitioning from IC (individual contributor) to design manager

I wanted to understand more about the impact of transitioning to a management role on designers’ wellbeing so I ran a survey with more than 175 design leaders from around the world.

While the majority of respondents (74.5%) said they were satisfied with their current role, 60% also said they wouldn’t be happy taking a bigger role, indicating a state of unease with their position.

As we all know, feeling supported is a key part of being comfortable in any role, however 73.4% said they have no mentor or coach, and 38% said they did not feel adequately supported by their manager. When you consider that feedback it’s no wonder that a whopping 84.7% of design leaders surveyed said that they feel a lot of pressure in their roles and 83.9% have felt burnt-out. So the evidence supports the opinion that people have been struggling.

These numbers paint an unpleasant picture, but there is a bright side. The majority of respondents stated that they feel (emotionally or socially) close to the people they work with, feel optimistic about their future and most importantly are keen to be better managers. All are all key aspects to good mental wellbeing according to the NHS.

Help & guidance for navigating the storm

Today the design practice is not mature enough to have pure management track all the way from education to retirement, but what follows is a list of tips that I’ve relied on to help transition from designer to design leader.

1. Make an outlet for your creative cravings
   You shouldn’t switch off your enjoyment for creating and seeing outputs, so look for a new channel e.g. side projects, learning new skills, sketchbooks.
2. Change what you wear when you get home
   This small action has proven mental health benefits. The process of discarding your workwear helps distinguish you, from your work. Also, think carefully about your lanyard. When the day is over remove it from your body, so you’re no longer tagged by your employer.
3. Interject your book pile with non-work titles
   Learning more about your work and developing your knowledge is important, but should not be your only source of learning and growth.
4. Keep a notepad close by, especially by the bed
   Get good at lists – particularly at the end of the day. Carrying work thoughts around is exhausting, so get them out of your head.
5. Don’t send messages out-of-hours
   By all means, draft notes or messages when inspiration or clarity strikes, but don’t send anything late at night or very early morning. It sets a bad example in your team and a precedent that you’re never out of contact.
6. Own your inbox and your calendar
   A manager’s time and attention are precious. It’s very easy to get swept away with ad-hoc demands. Try setting times for dealing with emails each day and holding time in your calendar for getting tasks done.

For more guidance on design leadership, check out Design Leaders Studio. It’s an online course, created to support designers taking their first steps into leadership.

From designer to manager — the trickiest transition was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Dedicated effort

Initially there was no dedicated role(s) across the department to run an optimisation effort. A few team members had built up their experience and skills in this area, but until we created a specific role it was never going to get the attention it deserved.

Creating new roles is not an easy task in an organisation that isn’t in startup mode, so I identified an opportunity to repurpose one of our existing roles. I set about writing a brand new role profile and agreeing with HR where it would sit within the org. Luckily I had an enthuastic team member who had already put lots of work in to getting things moving and was ready for a new challenge.

2. Using the tools correctly

One of our first tasks was to tidy up our Adobe Test & Target suite. Up until this point it had been used for lots ‘mitigation’ work that essentially gave the team a quick fix over gnarly code updates. Instead of doubling down on building reusable components, we were using optimisation tools, without unleashing their full potential. This was a nasty habit that I needed to break.

The resolution required lots of close collaboration and cajoling with our friends in technology as it meant passing responsibility over to DevOps and them standing up a new tech solution. Ultimately this allowed us to remove any items that weren’t optimisation experiments from the Adobe suite.

3. Knowing when to test — the 5 flags

The subject of ‘what is a good experiment?’ and ‘when to run split tests’ is a whole article in itself, but it was clear to me that the team needed a set of guide rails in which to operate. We’ve all heard stories of split tests being run to resolve design arguments or to placate senior stakeholders, so I wanted to start us from a solid base.

I boiled all the best practice ideas down to five challenges (I called them flags) that we put to every experiment. If an idea can stand up against these, then it would move to the next stage.

1. Do you have a hypothesis? (if so what evidence is it based on?)
2. What is the expected commercial benefit?
3. Does the test help us improve the user experience?
4. Have we done this before?
5. Does this precede anything on our roadmap?

Today our Optimisation Manager uses these flags when approaching every request coming from Design / Product.

4. Reporting through a new lens

The standard practice when running split tests is to pit a ‘control’ against a ‘challenger’ to determine which is most successful, before delcaring a winner. We found that this language of ‘winners and losers’ can quickly undermine the value of experimentation. In my experience it soon leads to either a culture of only testing when you’re confident you’ll ‘win’, which devalues the learning process or it leads to a position where designers are testing to prove their point, instead of testing to gather insights.

The way we report tests seemed critical and has been an area that I gave a lot of attention. We now have two outcomes to any optimisation testing.

First is a ‘revenue generator’. This is when the ‘challenger’ outperforms the ‘control’. We calculate what the new design will add to our revenue over a 1 year period.

The second outcome is a ‘cost saver’. This is when the ‘challenger’ does not perform as well as the ‘control’. When this happens we add how much we would have spent building it and how much the revenue downturn would be over the year.

5. Storing and sharing learnings

Setting up working practices is only half of the task, when building a new capability. The other half is communicating the change and helping the organisation understand the benefits. To tackle this I started with a basic report template, that was emailed out when every experiment was complete.

The second stage was to ensure that all of the findings were accumulating in one place to avoid the inbox crush, so we built a simple Sharepoint site and listed all the reports by product area.

The final stage was to move from pushing information out to pulling teams to the data. Top line results were emailed out with a link to the Sharepoint site replacing the reports. All report info was now placed on the site, rather than inside documents.

6. Integrating effort

When learning how other organisations had setup their optimisation program I saw a trend of having a separated team. Having a team sitting outside of product teams often leads to overlapping effort and creates a challenge of experiments accumulating towards directions that don’t inform product strategies.

The model we’re currenty runnning places my Optimisation Manager role as a consultant to all our product teams. Pushing opportunities, advising on ideas, shepherding efforts and connecting dots between teams. However any design, content and strategies come from the product teams, so they retain control over where the research is adding value.

Outcome

When I joined Virgin Atlantic in 2017 the team had run a total of 3 split tests over the course of the year. Today we’re running 40+ experiments per year and we’ve uncovered more than £1.5m in revenue opportunities and around £700k in overhead savings.

As our capabilities continue to mature we’re able to move away getting the basics right and on to more complex experiments and more targeted. All of which is bringing the focus of the product teams back to outcomes and is now feeding our decisions with richer data.

The line between great leadership and being a terrible boss is surprisingly fine. Each day you’ll find yourself walking a tightrope of nuance that spans between confidence and ignorance. Stepping in to a role as a design leader can be a tricky process, regardless of whether or not it’s a promotion, a new company or a new team.

With each role there are many traps that can easily taint your reputation. Most of which are not immediately obvious and some of which may push against your instincts.

What follows is a selection of actions and behaviours that I’ve witnessed in design leaders and have commonly found at the root of team members’ frustrations. As a design leader I’ve also fallen foul of some of these sins, but the most important thing is to recognise that as a team leader, all of these actions have negative impacts on your team’s wellbeing. None of them in isolation may be enough to make a designer quit, but together they can quickly accumulate to create a toxic environment in your team and chip away at positivity, which in turn will impact the quality of work your team is outputting. They won’t just make your people unhappy, but these behaviours can diminish your team’s work — which will reflect badly on you.

1. You criticised your predecessor

Unless you’re working in a brand new startup you’ll be inheriting a degree of legacy. Even if your role is new, the function you fulfil will have some form of predecessor and it’s all too easy to openly criticise the incumbent. This is not an appropriate way to measure your success or make yourself look good, as it breeds an openly critical culture.

Try to remember that your role is to bring something new to the team. It’s therefore only natural that you won’t agree with approaches or decisions made by your predecessor. Try to keep in mind that what has gone before you, did not happen in the same context and you won’t want to be reviewed poorly once you’ve moved on.

2. You didn’t defend your team’s work

A team leader is often referred to as a “shit umbrella”. This means it falls to you to absorb any negativity from outside of team and turn it in to an opportunity. This also includes protecting your team from any tasks, demands or types of work that in anyway degrade its purpose and/or relevance. This is a challenging and thankless role to play, but it is none-the-less vital. Nothing will dismantle your team member’s output and attitude faster than seeing their hard work compromised or their skills underused.

To avoid this happening you (the design leader) need to run a continual campaign on behalf of your team. Keeping up a momentum of presenting work to other teams, sharing project outcomes and regularly updating stakeholders on the people, skills and experience in your team. This will help help people around your team make more informed decisions and it will also give you plenty of solid ground, when you need to say ‘no’.

3. You spoke the most in the design review

Your role as a team lead is not to become the central point of failure. Unless you’re running a consultancy in your own name you’re part of an ecosystem, not an autocracy. Which means your behaviour needs to be balanced between leading from your experience and building autonomy. Design leaders who think they will become a Steve Jobs type figure, placing themselves at the centre of every decision, will quickly find they are simply micro-managing and being a blocker. A design review is the starkest forum for these attitudes to be seen. If you find you’re talking the most in a review, then you should take that as a sign that your team is not confident, autonomous or feeling empowered.

In feedback and review sessions take the role of the facilitator. Encourage conversations, ask tricky questions, set the scene before work is critiqued, quell any disagreements and summarise any actions, but don’t make it the ‘me show’.

4. You rescheduled 1–2–1s for anything

Your team’s 1–2–1 sessions are an important outlet for them. It’s the supportive framework and the guiding hand they need. As a leader this is your most acute moment to perform your role, so when you reschedule it to go out for lunch it hurts them. If they get dropped, ignored or perpetually rescheduled it sends a clear message to your direct reports that their progression is not a priority.

Your time is in high demand. The more team members you have, the more closely your time needs to be managed. So you need to consider when 1–2–1s happen, how frequently and how long you can realistically commit to.

5. You took your time dealing with HR matters

Every manager will have to get involved in some form of HR related tasks. Whether it’s organising maternity pay, chasing p45s or recruiting, at some point these matters will rely on you. Let’s be honest; this work is not what you signed up for. You will struggle to find a design leader who is motivated by the prospect of dealing with HR processes, but these are the items that have a direct effect on people’s lives. By putting these tasks off you are de-prioritising the wellbeing of the people you are trying to motivate. All of us want to feel like we’re taken care of. On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs this stuff sits right at the base. No amount of cool project work will counter a shortfall in employee benefits or a miscalculated bonus.

It’s worth your time making friends with operational teams. If you can find allies in HR, IT, Security and Recruitment then you can find the most painless paths to getting important items dealt with.

6. You gave the best work to an agency/contractor

Every in-house team needs support. Whether it’s providing specialist skills or simply extra hands to get the work done, there will be times that your team needs to draft in an agency or contractors. If you find that the support teams are tackling the big strategic design challenges, whilst your in-house team takes care of “BAU” then you’re going to face a wall of frustration from your permanent members of staff. In the long run your team will feel they’re inheriting work from outsiders and they may also get the impression their skills and opinions aren’t recognised.

If you don’t have an adequate base of experience or skill inside your team and hiring more isn’t an option, but you do have budget then consider using then an agency to provide a support/training system for addressing that.

7. You ‘rolled your sleeves up’ and took over a design

A project wasn’t go well so you’ve stepped in to fix it. But instead of giving your team encouragement and helping them solve problems themselves, you felt you should take control of the design. The temptation is strong with anyone who has come from a practitioner (or IC) background. You may well have vented some creative frustration and you may well have got the design closer to what you had imagined, but the reality is that you’ve undermined your team and left them to wipe up your sparkling shit.

Remind yourself that it’s your role is to lead the design work. Your role is not to do the work for them. If your team is unable to solve a problem, then you (as their leader) are the problem. If your team is frustrated and confused, then this is a reflection of your leadership. In these moments of difficulty don’t give in to your ego and stay focussed on making yourself unnecessary. The more your team learns to work through these sticky patches, the more your time will be freed up to chase after new opportunities.

7 deadly sins of a design leader was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.