If you’ve been a designer long enough, you’ve probably realized this truth:

A great manager can accelerate your growth, amplify your confidence, and make work genuinely fulfilling.
A bad one, on the other hand, can quietly drain your creativity — even in the most exciting company.

I learned this lesson not just through personal experience, but through something more humbling — my own Manager NPS (Net Promoter Score) feedback from my team members. Each year, I read honest reflections from my team about what I did well and what I could do better. Their words reminded me that leadership isn’t defined by titles or design awards, but by how we show up for our people — how we listen, guide, and create space for others to thrive.

So, I turned that feedback into something useful for you — a set of 12 questions you can ask in interviews to understand whether your potential manager is someone who will support your growth or simply manage your output.

⚠️ That said, these questions can feel intimidating — especially to less experienced Design Managers. Please use them thoughtfully and with empathy. They’re best suited for Senior/Staff designers speaking or interviewing with Senior/Staff Design Managers.

Remember, these aren’t “gotcha” questions. They’re conversation starters — signals to reveal how a design leader thinks, acts, and cares.

🧭 On Feedback & Growth

1. How do you usually provide feedback to your team members — formally in design reviews or informally during projects?

→ Why it matters: Great managers don’t just critique; they coach. You’ll sense whether they view feedback as a process or a partnership.

2. Can you share an example of how you helped a team member grow professionally?

→ Listen for sincerity and specifics. A vague answer often means growth isn’t a structured part of their leadership style.

3. How do you balance giving direction with giving autonomy to your designers?

→ You want someone who trusts your judgment but stays close enough to guide you when it matters.

🤝 On Communication & Advocacy

4. When conflicts or misalignments arise between teams, how do you help your designers navigate those situations?

→ A supportive manager will talk about protecting focus and helping you advocate for user-centric decisions.

5. How do you typically communicate with cross-functional partners to advocate for design needs?

→ Their answer will reveal how design is positioned within the organization — as a partner or as a service.

6. How do you ensure the team stays aligned on both business goals and design priorities?

→ Great design leaders translate between worlds — business and user experience. Look for a balance, not a bias.

💛 On Empathy & Culture

7. How do you create an environment where people feel comfortable sharing different perspectives?

→ The best managers invite dissent and curiosity; they don’t lead by fear.

8. What steps do you take to maintain team morale during high-pressure projects?

→ Pressure is inevitable. Support is optional. A good manager knows how to protect the team’s mental space. Look for empathy.

9. What does work-life balance look like on your team?

→ Their answer tells you how they view you — as a person with a life or as a resource with deliverables. Look for team culture (not company culture)

🌱 On Recognition & Motivation

10. How do you recognize and celebrate team achievements?

→ Watch how they speak about celebration. Genuine leaders show pride in their people, not just metrics.

11. Do you encourage team members to explore different types of projects or roles?

→ This reveals if they believe in career mobility and creative growth — or prefer keeping you in one lane.

12. What qualities do you value most when helping your designers grow?

→ You’ll quickly see if they prize curiosity, craftsmanship, collaboration, or compliance.

Why These Questions Matter

You might not need to ask all — but even a few can uncover the texture of a manager’s leadership style. You’ll notice patterns:

• Do they speak with empathy or authority?
• Do they use “I” more than “we”?
• Do they talk about people’s growth or the company’s output?

Good design management, much like good design, is about intentionality — the small decisions that make an environment feel safe, inspiring, and worth investing in.

A Closing Thought

When I read my own NPS feedback, the comments that stayed with me weren’t about strategy decks or KPIs. They were about moments of care — when I helped unblock someone, gave them confidence to try something new, or simply listened.

Those are the moments that, to me, define great leadership. And as you look for your next opportunity, I hope these questions help you find a manager who brings out the best in you.

If you found this helpful…

Save it for your next interview or share it with a fellow designer.

The best teams aren’t just made of great designers — they’re built by great Design Managers who help them grow.

Clap 👏 , if you enjoyed it, so others can find it
Comment 💬, if you have a question you’d like to ask or know more about
Follow me (Praty) on Medium to discover more Practical UX ideas, Design Manager Reflections, or just say Hi 👋

Please give it as many claps as you can! Clapping is free and helps me get the content out to more readers ❤️

Design NDA Disclaimer
*To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information. All information presented is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of the company.*

How to captivate your UX interviewers using this simple trick…

During an interview session with Trip.com, I decided to proactively present a quick and dirty Competitor Research of their Trip.com app. But why?

For the ones in a hurry. tl;dr

The analysis report is below ↓.

Nice. You scrolled past the image! Woo hoo… I assume you are one of the very few of us who loves to read.

Behind the Scenes

Interviewing with good companies is always challenging. You need to be different, bold, and creative to capture their interest and show them that you truly value their work-culture, vision, and business. I was recently in one such situation — interviewing for a Senior UX Designer role at Trip.com.

I had all the basics covered — researched about the company, had my questions to the interviewers ready, and practiced my previous work (Alibaba.com case studies). The night before the interview, when I was about to hit the bed after a grueling workday, I decided to go through my sample interview questions which I had so diligently collected earlier.

However, I soon realized,

“Well, every other candidate would do the same… practice the questions, go through the case studies, etc. How am I different?”, I pondered. That is when I decided to try something bold & different. Trying to go beyond the expected and be a pleasant surprise to the interviewers. Why not?

My goal was to let the interviewers focus on my strengths. The best way is to show and tell. Further, every interviewer loves to hear about the success of their company and how they can improve on it. So, if I provide some constructive feedback, users’ voice, and design suggestions to the interviewers, they can’t help but feel invested in the conversation.

Long story short, after I presented my work, the interviewers appreciated it and were happily involved in discussing details of their current project. If I hadn’t done the self-project, maybe it would have turned out to be your run-of-the-mill bland interview.

You can find the competitor summary report I presented, above.

Moral of the story:

Don’t be shy to try new ideas, push the boundaries, or think outside the box. Here, the result doesn’t matter much. It’s the effort you put in that matters.

Your goal is to stand out from your competition. To let the interviewer remember you.

Good luck with your next interview. 🙃

Well, this wasn’t a real business project. But, if you are interested to get a glimpse of the projects I carried out at Alibaba.com as a Sr. UX Designer, check out my portfolio below ↓

Pratyush Pandab — Portfolio

Thanks for reading. And, before you go…

Your claps motivate me to share my insights with others.

Clap 👏 , if you enjoyed it, so others can find it
Comment 💬, if you have a question you’d like to ask or know more about
Follow me (Praty) to know the inside stories from Alibaba.com Design and more…

Thanks for reading! Get in touch →

Design NDA Disclaimer
*To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information. All information presented is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of the company.*

From inconsistent navigation w/ over 26 different header styles to just 1 header. Detailed design system for B2B e-commerce website navigation.

When you have over 1.5 million¹ unique visitors on a site, it is imperative to provide a consistent, coherent, and meaningful navigation experience throughout the website for the best user experience. But not every page in an e-commerce platform is built the same and not every page has the same goals. And then there are business needs that are prioritized during a certain period of the year — e.g. promotional events, that lead to prioritizing marketing promotions over users’ pre-intent tasks. Over the past 19 years of its existence, all these have led to 26 different header styles on Alibaba.com. 🤯. Further, multi-language wasn’t a priority back then, so the old header UI misbehaved when translated to languages other than English.

Hence, we were tasked to provide a better IA and simple & consistent navigation experience to users throughout the website so they know where they are and can retrace their paths as they continue browsing, whilst meeting the various business needs for all Alibaba.com marketplaces, services, promotions, and landing page scenarios. And, here’s the solution — one header to rule them all. (I am going to be wrong in assuming this, but more on that later.)

Results ¹

Overall, 3% increase in click rate for each Link in the header. 👍

Overall, 2.5% average increase in organic traffic to subsequent pages. 👍

0.5% drop in click rate for User profile. 👎

Behind the scenes

My Role

I led the design of the New Header experience between January and April 2019 and collaborated with two Engineers and two Product Manager (and multiple other business stakeholders). To me, collaboration is the key to the best creative problem-solving experience possible.

Also, I performed user research, drafted prototypes, conducted user testing, delivered visual assets, and saw the project through its development. The page went live on February 22nd, 2019.

Next, I’ll only discuss the Header redesign process for the top 3 scenarios — Homepage, Search, and Details. (Marketplaces, Services, and Landing Pages will be covered in another case study.)

1. Vision + Goals

Our high-level goals were:

1. Consistent navigation throughout the website. Measurement: Can we one unified header solution to cover all the website pages (or with minimal changes).
2. Get more traffic to webpages from the Header. Measurement: Increased click UV for links.
3. Make it easy for the user to understand the navigation. Measurement: Better information architecture based on qualitative user data.
4. Cater to all business needs. Measurement: All business stakeholders should be satisfied with the results (internal survey).

2. Problems

01/ Inconsistency

As discussed earlier, the primary issue was the inconsistency in the Header. The header changed while navigating between pages and finding the same navigation element across pages was near to impossible. Refer to the image: 26 different header styles on Alibaba.com.

02/ Link Sprinkling — Poor IA

The old header included repeated links to the same function — a classic case of link sprinkling, hoping that one of the links will attract the user. This created confusion for the users (reported by 8/10 users from our User Research Study) as they would always “hope” to find the desired link in one of the navigation items by hit & trial. This was because of a lack of proper logical information structure in the Header.

03/ Multi-Language + Responsive

The old header didn’t take into account all the multi-languages scenarios that might affect the responsive designs. Due to this, Links started to overlap and information wasn’t recognizable.

04/ No visibility for Promotion/Deals

Alibaba.com hosts temporary ‘Promotions/Deals’ a.k.a ‘Activities’ that lasts for a week to a month depending on the type of activity. However, the visibility of these activities is only on the Homepage banners. Once the user navigates away from the homepage, there would be no means to access the promotions.

Also, not all users are organic traffic that would land on the homepage. Like every other e-commerce platform, Alibaba.com has a plethora of landing pages. Collectively, these pages get a significant amount of traffic that never gets to know the ongoing Activities on Alibaba.com — a missed opportunity.

The Promotion business team wanted us to figure out a solution to increase the traffic to their pages.

3. Solution

01/ Background Research

We performed a competitor analysis of 24 different website headers.

We wanted to learn what were the common links (link groups) being used, the placement of these links, and the copy being used by our primary competitors. We also closely analyzed the multi-language and responsive behavior of these websites.

Next, we analyzed the Alibaba.com header click UV data. (I cannot disclose real the data ¹*, but, here’s an approximation of the click engagement for the various items on the old header.)

Keeping aside the Alibaba.com logo click data, it was evident that the engagement was the highest for the profile/account management which included various entrances and notification. Contrary to our beliefs, the Orders and Favorites entrances had a low engagement.

02/ Improving the Header IA

We first conducted an open card sorting to help us evaluate the information architecture of the site and understand our users’ expectations. 11 participants organized and labeled topics into categories that would make sense to them. We used sticky notes for the card sorting.

Based on users’ grouping, and a few rounds of internal team discussion, we summarised the categories as follows.

Lastly, based on the above card sorting findings and the competitive analysis, we divided the header into 3 layers, viz.

i. Basic e-commerce — Logo, Search, Profile/Account Management

ii. Markets & Services — Marketplaces, Services, Help, Language Switch, App download

iii. (Optional) Page navigation — site pages would have their navigation

Layering all the 3 sections:

Below is the IA breakdown of the Header and how we arrived at the conclusion.

03/ Handling Multi-language. Gracefully.

Alibaba.com website supports 16 languages. Designing a header (or any other page) while taking into account all 16 languages has its own set of challenges.

I used my simple Translation Sheet to calculate the max (and average) multi-language word length for the Links. e.g. ‘Help’ text (4 characters) would need more space when translated to French, (Aidez-Moi).

04/ Designs

During the design phase, we came up with various versions for the Header.

After several rounds of design critique (My Design Critique Template) and feedback from key stakeholders, we decided 2 Header styles for A/B test.

We also accounted for multi-language and proper responsive breakpoints.

The new header is now live on Alibaba.com. Feel free to try it out. (Not all suggested designs were implemented due to limited engineering resources.)

4. Results ¹

The AB test results helped us decide the final Header version. From a design point of view, we (most designers) preferred Version B over Version A, however, the various links click data was better for Version A.

We also split the traffic, 33.33% (New Header) & 66.67% (Old Header) to measure the click data. The New Header outperformed the old header in overall click data.

Final Data:

Overall, 3% increase in click rate for each Link in the header. 👍

Overall, 2.5% average increase in organic traffic to subsequent pages. 👍

0.5% drop in click rate for User profile. 👎

The click rate for the User Profile decreased by 0.5%. (More data analysis needs to be done to uncover the reasons behind this decrease.)

5. Next?

In the coming months, we’ll be extending this new header to cover Marketplaces, Services, Landing Pages, and Forms on Alibaba.com. There will be some changes to the New Header layout to account for its respective page’s goal.

(We are in the middle of an AB test with just 1% of the traffic to test what would happen if we use this new extended header on some of our Search SEO Landing pages. We hypothesize that it would increase the bounce rate of that page. Only time will tell. 🤞)

Stay tuned for the next case study…

Just for gigs, we also tried a dark version of the header. …. 🤢

¹ The data do not represent real values. These are proportional to the real data and have been created for sharing outside of alibaba.com.)

Design NDA Disclaimer
*To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information. All information presented is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of the company.*

Thanks for reading. And, before you go…

Clap 👏 , if you enjoyed it, so others can find it
Comment 💬, if you have a question you’d like to ask or know more about
Follow me (Praty) to know the inside stories from Alibaba.com Design and more…

More interesting reads…

We designed and developed an optimized payment flow that shows our free sellers the real benefits of being a paid seller on Alibaba.com. 👇

Alibaba.com Global Suppliers Membership Payment Flow Upgrade

You can help your teammates make sense of Cross-cultural design for websites/apps. Here’s an extensive slide deck just for you — Clearly Cultural. 👇

Clearly Cultural

Or, conduct an Accessible Design workshop to talk about inclusive designs. Here’s how I did it 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/conducting-accessible-design-workshop-pratyush-pandab/

Thanks for reading! Get in touch →