What Does a Design Director Do Anyway?

I spend a lot of time coaching businesses in how to build and manage design teams. A question that comes up a lot — or I should say, a misunderstanding that I frequently observe, since no one ever directly asks me this question — is, Do design directors design?

The answer is, Yes. Of course.

When I hear hiring managers — usually non-designers — asking whether a design manager should also be an individual contributor, I know we have a language problem.

Design, as everyone pretty much knows by now, is not merely the act of pushing a cursor around a Creative Cloud application or outputting assets from Sketch. “Hands-on” designing is a misnomer. Design happens in the head, not the hands.

Designing is meeting business goals with solutions to user experience pain points while adhering to the company branding and marketing strategy. Collectively, this is the design strategy, and it’s 80% of what the design director is responsible for. (The other 20% of the time she is managing schedules, establishing processes, coaching & mentoring and soothing egos.)

The value a design director brings to a product team is her ability to make strategic decisions about the extended future of the product. Depending on the lifecycle of the company, that may be a 6 month or a 6 year period, but it’s more than just what’s launching at the end of the next sprint. The director combines the goals of the user with the goals of the business to prioritze, stack-rank and intelligently roll out features that achieve the greatest impact.

Does that mean he sits down and sketches the wires for a new screen or works out the design of a button himself? It depends on how granular he likes to get, and how much he trusts his design team.

• Certainly, he is making decisions about the color palettes, typography and functionality.
• She is absolutely digging deep into the usability testing and analytics and greenlighting changes and improvements to meet the product team’s KPIs.
• And without a doubt she is ideating with team members about the best way to solve a complicated interaction.

All of the above is designing. It all requires a farsighted and decisive individual who can ensure that everything coming out of the design department adheres to the business goals and meets UX benchmarks and standards set by the product team.

Without this kind of guidance and decision making, team members are more likely to shoot from the hip or design from their gut. Sure, product managers do what they can to guide the creative process, but they’ve got a lot on their plates already. Ensuring that the right hex of blue is being used in that new feature, or that the button interactions are consistent across 40k pages of an eCommerce site, or digging deep into the five whys of an analytics drop off is probably not their top priority.

That’s what a design manager does. That’s what design really is.