Musings of a design leader (Part I)
Back in Q3 of 2022 I set myself the personal challenge of writing a series of reflections (musings), based on my experiences as a design leader. My goal was to recount on a number of topics that I’ve encountered over the years to produce a post per week, every week, over the course of the quarter.
For those that follow my work, I’m a huge advocate of the process of writing, as a means to explore and reason perspectives, and as a way to express and articulate my opinions. The process of writing my thoughts down over the years — whether well formed or in their infancy — has allowed me to better communicate, as a leader, on all manner of topics.
For me, writing is a convergent process of distilling experience and opinion into a narrative that is coherent, engaging and hopefully thought-provoking.
This is part one of a two-part article (see also Musings of a design leader part II) summarising these reflections.
Note: The following are based on my opinions, and my opinions alone.
Musing #1: On designing with intent
Design is all about intent; specifically, the act of problem solving within given constraints — subject, object, context and goal. By contrast, artistry is a subjective expression of our unbounded creativity.
As Designers we are both artists, driven by our passion for craft and self-expression, and problem-solvers, that follow a more objective and systematic creative process.
Our training and experience help us recognise how to apply the tools of our craft to bring about a specific change, for a given audience, in order to achieve a desired outcome.
Self-expression and problem-solving are not mutually exclusive, they are two sides of the same coin.
Musing #2: On design topologies
A design org is an evolving sub-system that adapts over time to support various networks (topologies), within a given company, at a given scale, and subject to relative maturity.
At smaller scales we tend to configure across the horizontal of a tightly bounded offering; centralising the design org and operating as a service to the wider business. This optimises for collaboration within the practice but inevitably creates more hand-offs and a higher communication overhead.
As a company scales, and both scope and maturity increase, we introduce and optimise for mission-based product verticals. The design org becomes distributed, but more integrated into the end-to-end product process, reducing the communication overhead but siloing practice and routine collaboration.
At larger scales, we inevitably end up trying to support both vertical and horizontal org configurations. We likely introduce new structures and operating models in an effort to bridge these distributed circles, and in order to enable common practices, facilitate collaboration, and drive a cohesive culture, at scale.
Growth necessitates agility and the need to experiment and innovate; not just with our design practices and ways of working, but how we fundamentally configure our orgs, the circles we interface with, and what we’re optimise for at each integer of scale.
Musing #3: On growth tracks
As designers, at a certain point in our professional career, we reach a natural tipping point. Here, we see our intrinsic motivations around growth, impact, and recognition require a fundamental choice about our trajectory for onwards progression. This is often a pivotal moment in our design journey, where we take stock of what we’ve learnt from our practitioner origins and ask ourselves “what’s next?”
For want of a better metaphor, for many this can be something of a red pill, blue pill moment.
Take the red pill and continue the path as an individual contributor, where your motivation and success maps to your continued ability to solve for for more complex, strategic problems, drive aspects craft and practice, and where you realise your own personal success through the execution of design; fundamentally keeping your “hands dirty”.
Take the blue pill and leave behind your legacy as an individual contributor, where your motivation and success maps to a new set of people skills, a reliance on your ability to coach others, and where you realise your own personal success vicariously; investing in the wellbeing and growth of others, who in-turn succeeded through great design.
To break the metaphor for a second, there is, from experience, a third scenario (a green pill for arguments sake), which represents a legitimate but less trodden pathway in the form of the career traversal. Here, there is likely some aspects of an adjacent practice (e.g Product Management) where your personal success relates to a greater sense of accountability for product outcomes.
What’s common throughout each pathway are the fundamentals of leadership. Increasing your influence and impact isn’t a function of management, it’s a function of seniority. Whether that seniority comes by virtue of craft, people or product, the common denominator is how you scale your impact through influence, and the behaviours that enable you to be a force multiplier.
Musing #4: On leveraging fidelity
Fidelity, in design, relates to a scale of quality or accuracy that is used to depict various states of a given design, through the phases of the creative process.
It relates to how we use a canvas (physical or digital) in order to render our ideas and advance iteratively from concept to implementation; creating sufficient opportunity for feedback and iteration along the way.
Jump too fast to our “final”, high-fidelity design and we risk investing too much time in crafting the perfect solution, upfront, and with fewer opportunities to test the fundamental idea that is core to a proposition.
Spend too long in a lower fidelity state and we loose the accuracy and realism that may be required to solicit the level of detailed feedback we need, and that is required to refine and optimise a working solution.
Fidelity, therefore, is a tool that we must wield carefully as designers, both in order to test our critical assumptions early in the problem solving process, and to guide — from a position of knowledge — our detailed design decisions during implementation.
Early in our careers fidelity may equate to a series of linear iterations in an end-to-end process of exploration and refinement. Often perceived as necessary in order to following “best practice”, and required to create space for divergence and lateral thinking.
However, over time and with experience we learn to master the art of using fidelity with intent, moving beyond the mere versioning of our creative process, but rather leveraging fidelity as one of our most powerful tools for creating confidence and clarity.
Musing #5: On product thinking
Product Thinking, in a Design context, is both a mindset and approach that seeks to create a bridge between what a segment of a market is trying to achieve, in a given situation (the JTBD), and the offering you provide, as a vendor, in response to this demand (your value proposition).
It’s the intentional act of realising and maintaining Product Market Fit through a deep understanding of customers and the outcomes they are looking to realise. It considers our knowledge of the market, the strength of our product and where it fits into a wider competitor ecosystem, as well as how we might leverage new technologies in order to unlock opportunities for innovation.
So, how can we, as designers, practice and apply Product Thinking with our work?
1. Avoid designing in a vacuum and ensure every design decision is made consciously and with intent. Question what any given piece of work is intended to achieve, for whom and to what end, and how your work will directly support a desired outcome. If a solution is never used or fails to address the problem the customer is trying to solve, is it an exercise of vanity over value?
2. Follow and lead others to embrace a Continuous Discovery mindset. The world around us is changing, people’s motivations and expectation are not static, so in order to calibrate around market demand and ensure we design products and services out customer love, we need to be continually sensing and leave ourselves open to respond to new insight.
3. Establish enough business context needed in order to align and anchor your work around key product outcomes. Understanding the rationale behind a given product strategy enables us to focus on the opportunities we can leverage through Design. Here, we can optimise our efforts to address a specific sub-set of customer needs that explicitly support or product goals.
4. Walk the ladder back and forth, from solution back, and outcome forward. In other words, taking all the above into consideration, routinely evaluate that you’re staying the course and avoid falling into in a spiral of exploration and procrastination. Use logic and reasoning to map your work through to a the desired outcome, measure progress, and routinely challenge deviation.
As designers, we embrace Product Thinking through our ability to traverse from ambiguity (“we have a solution we think our costumers will love”) to certainty (“we have a product we know out customers love”). At its core, we use the tools of Design to create a sustainable exchange of value between customer and vendor; ensuring our products arrive and thrive in their respective markets.
Musing #6: On creating alignment
One of our biggest responsibilities as leaders is to create alignment by reducing ambiguity. A lack of alignment leads to misunderstanding, misinterpretation, an inability to make coherent and seemingly well-reasoned decisions, and ultimately creates a heightened sense of stress and anxiety for those who are left in a state of speculation.
As designers, we are used to operating within a certain amount of product ambiguity, but our job is to provide a degree of clarity and direction when it comes to the a wider set of systemic, organisational unknowns. As leaders, who serve our teams, the greatest gift we can offer is context by by pulling on and untangling the threads of ambiguity.
In my experience, there are at least four thematic areas where we can better equip and enable our teams by providing context and clarity:
1. Business Context: This is about leveraging our understanding of wider business goals and current operating constraints. These factors can heavily influence our overall direction and strategy, as well as the choices/options at our disposal with regards to our approach, resourcing, organisational design and operating models. It’s the meta view of policies, choices and trade-offs that impact and influence our local decisions.
2. Vision & Strategy: Here, we play a role in ensuring that the desired direction and current focus is not just understood, but but is explicitly driving the choices teams make day-to-day. As artefacts, they serve to guide teams towards a coherent North Star, helping them to prioritise what’s in and out of scope and ensuring each significant release or milestone takes us one step closer to a desired end state.
3. Motivation & Skills: Another important attribute of alignment is in ensuring people’s personal and professional motivations align to work in question. At a fundamental level, we can help guide folks and orchestrate team dynamics that not only pique their individual interests, but ensure we have the right people, with the right compliment of skills, working on the most engaging challenges.
4. People & Practice: Last, but not least, are the interpersonal aspects of any given group dynamic. Leading healthy ceremonies to foster cohesion, practicing good communication strategies, and helping build healthy, collaborative ways of working to ensure teams start together, and are aligned throughout. The more complex and multi-faceted our orgs, the more critical the role of leadership in creating convergence.
As leaders, we should consider ourselves as conduits for context, where this (context) is a prerequisite to enabling teams to do their best work; reducing — to the best of our ability — systemic and organisational ambiguity.
Musing #7: On democratising expertise
Democratisation has become something of a buzzword. For a while it’s felt like the latest trend in the design space. Democratisation, in a design context, is a model for leveraging practice at scale that also seeks to build understanding and empathy for an aspect of craft. But, is democratisation always the best strategy and can democratisation be more harmful than good?
It can certainly be effective approach in enabling organisations to level up core product practices, in order to create empowered, cross-functional teams. Particularly where these expertise are in short supply! Take for example aspects of research, where a smaller, centralised team may struggle to keep pace with the demands of the org. Levelling up “non-researchers” enables teams to self-serve their learning needs, unlock local decisions and ensures that research isn’t a bottleneck.
The trade off with this approach, however, is often one of quality. Be that in aspects of UI design, research of copywriting. While, in spirit, enabling others to carry out said tasks sounds like a great idea, without strong communities and governance practices, this can drag down our bar for quality and introduce a level of risk. This also assumes others in non-design roles have the capacity and willingness to be educated, and to extend the scope and remit of their role to encompass these additional responsibilities.
And while everyone can and should practice Design Thinking — a collaborative problem-solving process — not everyone is, or should be a designer.
Unbounded democratisation can also lead to a dilution of expertise, where on the one hand it empowers others to develop and deploy a set of skills that might otherwise Inhibit a team, yet, on the other, it can create the perception of level playing field; one where the opinions of experts can hold less value. Where taken to the extreme, the democratisation movement can undermine and sometimes detract from the credibility of trained professionals.
The best outcome is where we can leverage both a body of expertise, staffed meet the needs of the org, in addition to educational practices that are consumed — by choice, not necessity — from those in non-design roles. Those who have a real passion to develop, adopt and apply aspects of craft, either based on a desire to broaden their core skillset, or as part of a more explicit development pathway.
Ultimately, we should avoid a trade-off scenario; doubling down on the expertise of those who are highly skilled in matters of craft, and where the risk of poor quality in execution is high. Through governance, tooling and quality control we enable the wider org to safely adopt and apply core skills to the more tactical aspects of their product work.
As such, we optimise for deep expertise, over commoditising practice, where the goal is to educate rather than replicate.
