Are you developing a well-rounded design team?
When you lead a design team, of any size and shape, it becomes part of your leadership responsibility to develop the talent you have. You must help your designers develop new skills, embrace new experiences as learning opportunities, and imbue a sense of progress. We must do this to push the team’s skills forward and give folks a chance to progress in their careers.
The challenges of using development frameworks
Today most teams fall back on the career development framework. This approach attempts to quantify a mixture of skills, attitudes, and behaviours against an atypical view of the ideal designer.
Anyone who has extensively used a development framework can testify to how tricky they can make conversations. Because of the linear structure, it’s very easy to become fixated on the idea of it being a path from A to B, in order to get a promotion. Development frameworks have a singular route forwards, which also means they tend to just focus on craft skills or mix craft skills up with the skills required to thrive inside an organisation.
Reframing “soft skills” as business maturity
The role of a designer is bigger than the craft of a design. Being a successful designer is more than the ability to produce beautiful interfaces. It requires skills to navigate org structures and establish a place in which good design can exist. No matter how skilled a person may be in designing UI in Figma or building prototypes in Origami, if they can’t articulate their process to their stakeholders, build healthy relationships with their teammates or collaborate with their peers, then the work is unlikely to be accepted by an organisation.
As Jared Spool has pointed out, great design comes from learning to operate successfully inside an organisation and speak the language of the business.
For a designer to go beyond beautification and have a meaningful impact, they must understand the needs of the business to the same depth that they understand the needs of the user(s).
The skills required to do this are often referred to as ‘soft skills’. In the past these have also been referred to as ‘the business of design’ and the reality is that they are as vital as the craft skills needed to create design solutions. So it’s not unreasonable to consider a designer’s craft maturity alongside their business maturity.
An alternative approach
Regardless if your team is formed around a track for individual contributors and a track for people managers, there is still an interesting new perspective to be gained from drawing a line between craft levels and business levels.
If we take the craft maturity of a designer and the business maturity and plot them on separate scales we can start to build a different - possibly more useful - picture of each designer’s progress.
- Craft maturity would typically include items such as running workshops, UI design, prototyping, customer interviews, hypothesis writing etc
- Business maturity would typically include items such as strategy writing, reputation building or advocacy, reporting/storytelling, relationship building etc
Instead of a framework conversation that moves designers from A to B on a spreadsheet, the conversation now becomes about becoming a balanced designer who is not only able to produce good work, but successfully operate inside an organisation.
If we take this principle and apply it to Jason Mesut’s concept of mapping skills to a shape, then you can see how it stops being a linear journey and a question of balance. Each level within your team (e.g. principal, senior, mid) is now represented by a concentric shape.
By using this approach your role as a leader now becomes developing a more ‘rounded’ approach to each member your team and your designers can understand what is needed to grow inside a team, beyond their craft skills.
As with any personal tracking tools, there is a high degree of nuance and context which managers need to apply, before using these methods. It’s important to recognise that having different shapes can be advantageous to promoting diversity of thought, but probably more important to recognise that every team requires different shapes. The shape that works most effectively in my team, will not work as effectively in yours.
For more information on design leadership and guides to the role of a design manager check out Design Leaders Studio, an online course, created to support designers taking their first steps into leadership.
