What Makes A Design Leader And How To Grow As One
Last year, I created a framework to facilitate the evaluations for UX designers and, in the process of making it, I realized that there wasn’t much out there for design leaders. There’s a lot of literature for leaders in general, but there isn’t much catered to design.
This article attempts to fill that void and provide a framework that design leaders can pair with more general leadership books and guidelines so they may reflect on their own craft and continue their professional development.
What Makes A Design Leader
A design leader, compared to leaders in other professions, differ in some unique ways:
(1) Experience and exposure to the craft of design and the design process — At a minimum, a general idea of the design processes, how the processes can be adapted for different situations, and what is needed for projects to be successful.
(2) Experience with the tools of their design area — A general understanding of the tools and their constraints. This is essential to communicating effectively with your designers, developing rapport/trust with your team, and helping you advocate more effectively for them.
(3) An emphasis on developing a culture of collaborative exploration and innovation — While many other types of leaders care about it, there can be more expectations on design teams to deliver new products, services, or visions.
(4) Vision — A vision for where your organization and its products(s) will go a month, a year, and even ten years from now and what role those products will play in the marketplace or world.
(5) (Importance depends on organization) Being able to cultivate trust/influence — The leader is able to help design become an essential partner in the business, find opportunities, foster involvement, get funding/resources, and help projects be successful.
These key skills come from a variety of design sources. The first two were inspired by an exercise I was given by Travis Brown where he challenged designers to articulate what made them different from people who took a design thinking workshop or someone who occasionally wireframes. From the exercise, the main takeaways were (1) that the designers have a process that provides different results and perspectives. (2) The concepts that come from these perspectives are more easily prototyped by designers than those from other professions because they better understand the medium and tools.
The third point came from discussions with other designers and personal professional experience. A design culture plays a key role in inspiring, fostering collaboration, and encouraging innovation.
Vision plays a key role in the design process because it provides constraints, guidance, and inspiration for the team. When you ask people to explore, be creative, and play with ideas, a strong, clear vision that is communicated effectively can help channel those efforts in the right direction. It is important to note the vision shouldn’t be too prescriptive or constraining.
The final point of influence depends on the organization. While I have heard some people claim that design “finally has a seat at the table”, there are still a significant number of businesses growing their design practice, and being able to grow your team is especially relevant for design leaders in such an organization.
Evaluating Design Leaders
With these unique characteristics identified, how do we evaluate the design leaders? Below is a tool that can be used to evaluate the different types of design leaders within your organization.
This tool consists of four parts:
(1) The key skills that make someone a design leader.
(2) The importance of those skills based on your role in the organization — This is organization dependent. A design leader at a small organization may be responsible for role modeling and nurturing all six of the design leader skills, while multiple leaders at a large organization might be responsible for different aspects of the skills. Instead of tying the different levels to specific job titles which fluctuate from place to place, I aimed to tie the skills to the type of role you play:
People leader 1: How — How will a project be completed (methods, process, tools,…)?
People leader 2: Who — Who will be completing the project?
Vision leader 1: What — What projects should the design team be doing?
Vision Leader 2: Why — Why should the design team/organization be doing certain things?
(3) Ways to measure yourself — Characteristics exhibited by someone at a given level and indicators that help a leader identify their level.
The Framework
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Other Considerations
These aren’t all the skills and characteristics that make a strong design leader, rather these are just areas that appear to be unique to design leadership. This framework would be great to pair with other books and leadership frameworks. I originally tried to include other, more general characteristics of a leader, but found that it started to detract from the design focus. A good resources to find more general leadership guidelines is www.progression.fyi.
Thanks Yous And References
I would like to thank my coworkers, friends, and everyone who provided input on what they thought made a design leader.
Below are just some of the resources that inspired and helped me:
1. Todd Zaki Warfel’s Design Talk — InVision Design Talks — The design career journey
2. Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner’s book — Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams Kindle Edition
3. How Do You Measure Leadership? By Ali Rowghani
4. Demystifying Design Leadership Levels by Matthew Diamanti
