How to survive the design leadership reckoning.
Design leadership as we know it, is over, but it’s going to be OK.
Design leaders’ careers and place in the world of technology has changed and it’s not going to come back. It’s time for us to adapt to new demands and new opportunities. This is our reckoning.
What businesses need from design leaders has changed. Today’s tech market does not have the same appetite for elaborate design thinking practices, as demonstrated by the fortunes of design thinking pioneers IDEO. At 2023’s Leading Design conference Teak Tse, from Sky, vividly captured the collective mood, by referring to the double diamond as “triggering for stakeholders”. In the first half of 2024 more than 70% of advertised design leadership roles now require a demonstration of ‘craft skills’ and a ‘portfolio of design work’, even when leading teams of >50.
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You may have noticed the number of books, articles and events aimed at folks leading design teams has reduced, in recent years. A quick scroll through LinkedIn may not provide the same numbers of exciting new techniques than it used to and you may have noticed the lack of new leadership jobs being posted. Instead you may have also noticed an increase in posts regarding burnout, career switching and layoffs.
It appears the discipline of managing design teams is in “the trough of disillusionment”. It’s time for our design leadership community to move on, to let go of our firmly held beliefs, challenge ourselves and embrace the new realms of our collective value.
Post mortem
What happened? Why has the discipline of design leadership suffered? To help us understand the way forwards, we can asses what fuelled these changes.
There have been key moments in the evolution of product design and therefore design leadership
- Wild west. It’s apps. It’s social media. It’s responsive design. With the boom of a new tech market, we developed fast. We created a million iterations of our job titles and businesses tried to place design in a dizzying range of reporting lines.
- Oh I’m a manager!? Excitement grew as ICs were thrown into manager roles. Kristen Skinner wrote the book and taught us how to organise design teams. The Leading design conference launched. Julie Zhou blogged it all. We learned. We shared. We built communities.
- Reaching burnout. This is hard. Design has a seat at the table. Demand for design thinking and design leadership reaches its peak. Market mobility sores as design leaders average just 18 months in role, across the tech industry.
- Leading in a pandemic. The great forcing function. Some markets grew as the world changed and others came to a halt. As design leaders we had to figure out how to do our jobs remotely. We changed our hiring and managing tools. But as the world started to open up, a return to office fuelled the “great resignation”.
- The downturn. It’s bad all over. As the global economy shifted, venture capital slowed and mass layoffs swept through tech. Musk took over Twitter, gutted its product team and business leaders took notes. Google shuts down ‘moonshoot’ factory.
As a result of these ups and downs three key changes emerged.
The UX stack collapsed.
As design teams got smaller and smaller, the discipline stack collapsed. Teams merged. Leaders were asked to take on a broader remits. Content design, research and design have been drawn together under one banner. Specialist disciplines such as design strategists, prototypers, motion designers have blended into generalist design positions.
Markets got fierce.
As more and more SaaS products flood the market, the barriers to entry is becoming lower in all markets. The challenge/threat from disruptors is now higher than ever as large, slow moving teams struggle to adapt quickly to new channels, funnels and user expectations. Speed-to-market and efficiency is vital to survival.
AI has arrived.
After years of fear, speculation and expectation, general artificial intelligence has hit the mainstream. The design community is now facing a world where tools are readily available for anyone to quickly synthesise research findings, generate ideas, create content and edit images.
The new design leadership
Which brings us right up to today. This rise and fall of the tech product industry has lead us to our crucible moment. Product designers, content designers, researchers and those who lead these disciplines, now face a new future.
So let’s take a look at 5 survival tips for thriving in the new design leadership:
1. Increase your adaptability
Org changes, priority changes, tech changes, funding changes, we’ve seen it all. The ability to change, adapt and continue is now a key attribute for all design leaders. Successful design leaders can’t die on every hill and wage a war every time a process or strategy shifts. Equanimity is your new superpower. In the same way we once abandoned old style choices (skeuomorphic anyone?) and rushed towards new styles, we will all need to be happy letting go of methods we once fought for.
Survival tip : Ask yourself; are fighting to hang on to any methods or practices? if so, how might you achieve the same quality level, without them?
2. Learn to play out of position
Alongside adaptability is the increased need to ship. Because our markets are fiercer the design leaders role will continue to have fuzzy edges. To thrive in tech, a design leader needs to be happy playing out of position to get sh*t done. We need to enter the chat when it comes to product priorities, tech decisions and marketing strategy. In this slimmed down tech market, there is no room for fiefdoms.
Survival tip : Get a tech lead to give you a dummies guide to your architecture. Attend Product’s prioritisation sessions. Join the Product Marketing all-hands. Start building your point-of-view beyond design.
3. Round out your UX leadership
Over the past few years I’ve interviewed, mentored and surveyed a broad spectrum of design leaders. From new managers to high-level executives. To date, I have yet to meet a single design leader who didn’t start as an individual contributor. It’s normal to hold a bias towards the discipline we came from, however with a collapsed discipline stack and increasing amounts of AI powered tech, we need good content design and research more than ever, so work to round out your cross discipline leadership.
Survival tip : Create a goal to prioritise your learning. A good start point would be to read Stephanie’s book on UX Research and Rachel’s book on leading content design.
4. Experiment with new workflows.
We are back into a learning phase. As we become more adaptable, play out of position and round out our leadership, we have the opportunity to explore new tools and develop new design methods. To support our businesses moving as fast as the competition we need to explore new ways of working.
Ask hard questions of your workflow, such as ‘does every project need a discovery phase?’ or ‘does each update needs to be an A/B test?’. The same can be applied to the tools you give your team, so ask yourself ‘is there a tool that can automate this?’.
Survival tip : Find opportunities to speed up your workflows by exploring new tools. Are you fully aware of the baked in AI features in Figma, Miro and Slack?
5. Become a product connoisseur.
When business leaders look for ‘craft skills’ in design leaders this does not necessarily mean we should be jumping into Figma and taking control. However, it does mean being able to clearly articulate an expert level opinion on design.
One of the most effective ways to establish yourself as a connoisseur of product design, is to build a practice of actively seeking out new apps, services and products and regularly bringing your observations back to your team.
Making it part of your job to share examples of good UI, interaction and content design with your team is a simple method for establishing a quality bar and demonstrating your knowledge, without undermining your team’s skills.
Survival tip : Set a quarterly reminder to download the top 3 apps each month. Take a grab of any interesting elements and share them with your team.
I believe we can all still enjoy fruitful careers leading design teams, but it won’t look the same. Many of the day-to-day operations will remain, but the paradigm and stakes are different. The new path will be an exciting mix of shape-shifting and solid foundations. I believe this is one of the most exciting and important eras for our community.
