How To Resolve The Designer’s Dilemma

In my previous article, I described the Designer’s Dilemma, which is this:

If you have the word designer in your job title, then you probably don’t own the most impactful design activities.

Designers overcome this dilemma by recognizing that they have the opportunity to influence those who do own other design activities. In fact, the only way for a designer to improve the user experience is to influence the design activities performed by other people (who have skills the designer does not possess,) a pursuit also known as leadership.

Design Managers — and also current design leaders at any level in an organizational hierarchy — have the responsibility to create a pathway through the confusion this dilemma creates. So how can you help passionate designer contributors grow into realized design leaders?

On Leadership

I’ve led and managed design teams of 50 and I’ve led design teams of 1. I’ve been in companies with 5 employees and companies with 6,000 employees and everything in between. In each role, I’ve seen that true leadership often doesn’t come from the managers or the directors or the VPs or the C-levels in the room. Leadership happens “in the trenches”. Good managers enable this leadership to happen.

The Tiers of Designing

The first thing to recognize is that individual designers will be operating from one of two tiers of influence in the company.

Figure 1. The Tiers of Designing

• Tier 1 (Composing Interfaces) Core technical and craft competency. These people serve as your UI Composition Specialists. This tier cannot be “skipped”; any designer who wants to achieve tier 2 needs to be strong and current as a UI composer. This tier is where designers train (and true professionals constantly train.)
• Tier 2 (Influencing Product Outcomes) These are your leaders — your actual, realized Designers. They are negotiating their way to positively influence the user experience. They’re impacting daily design decisions around what’s getting built, how it will survive economically, and how it will be engineered. The scale / scope of their influence will vary, based upon their experience, relationships, and approach.

Your goal should be to get as many people to tier 2 as possible. I’m not necessarily talking about promotions, I’m talking about results. Some designers will be at tier 1 and hungry to get to tier 2. Some will be happy in tier 1 and stay there. That’s OK. Some will be tier 2 and hungry for more scope. Your job is to invest the time to understand where each designer is and wants to be.

Enabling Tier 2

The designer’s dilemma can become a crisis if the designer doesn’t have a path to the second tier. In this case, crisis means disillusionment, disengagement, underperformance, and attrition. Here’s how you enable the path:

• Actively cultivate key leadership skills within individual designers of all levels: negotiation and influence, active listening, storytelling, decision-making, communication.
• Invest in user experience research. This is important and often design managers invest in this too late or box it in too tightly. Foremost, research helps designers improve in their craft. But just as importantly, building a relevant/current/credible Qualitative and Quantitative skillset within your design group enables you to identify and measure tangible outcomes for your team’s work. These tangible outcomes create organizational lift, giving designers leverage to operate at tier 2.
• In hiring, focus on diversity of all types: ethnic, cultural, socioeconomic, and also skillset strengths. This diversity elevates design discourse and helps you avoid design blind spots and design biases.
• Make sure designers are deployed according to their strengths so that they can be successful. Complement individual deployment with a robust collaborative design culture, and be sure that you are leading by example to create this culture within the design group. The diversity of your design group can and must positively impact every facet of your product. Nothing is more important that a healthy culture of open sharing and constructive critique. If you focus only on one thing, make it this. If you are deploying designers into agile teams then generally try to make sure they have ~20% free bandwidth to collaborate and help other projects.
• Don’t create specialized designer job titles. Just pick one and stick with it. Designers have enough of an existential dilemma without fretting over which subset of the designer subset they want to be. That is a distraction you can eliminate. All designers should have ownership of UI Composition in some area of the product.
• Be transparent about tier 1 and tier 2, in individual and group discussions. Talk about and celebrate the successes and the failures that enabled you to learn.
• I’d be remiss if I didn’t as least mention “Design Thinking.” In many ways I see Design Thinking as an organizational activity hack. It’s a way to embrace that design indeed happens everywhere, and that designers can facilitate a deeper awareness of design in other people’s everyday work. Personally, I think a more sustainable and more nuanced conceptual framework is Reflective Practice, as observed and described by Donald Schön.

If you’re helping to manage the designer’s dilemma, then I hope this helps.