What’s in a name? Defining design leadership roles

We’ve recently posted a new job ad. “Big deal!” you might think, “everyone posts jobs ads all the time!”. And if you’ve been following life at Auto Trader over the past year or so, you’ll know that we’ve had a variety of open roles in the design and research space through that time.

This one is a bit different though, especially in the route we took to defining that role. And having defined it, we’ve found it’s not the easiest to advertise — there’s so much divergence in the naming and meaning of roles in the UX field that it can be difficult to succinctly communicate what a role is and what the possibilities are.

So, I’m going to share the story of how we got here and what it means for us.

How things were

If we look back 18 months or so at Auto Trader, the way we structured design was very different to what we have today. It looked a bit like this.

On top of this, it’s important to note how design fits within the wider organisation. We operate a variation of the centralised partnership, where design people report to other designers in terms of line management & career development, and where there are several shared design concerns, but operate on a day-to-day embedded as part of multi-disciplinary teams.

In this structure, we broadly had two “teams” — one focussed on products for consumers (our main website, and apps) and one focussed on products for retailers (our web application that retailers use to manage their advertising). We had very few line managers — only two — and those people also juggled thinking about the coherence of those platforms and our design strategy.

A changing landscape

This model worked pretty well for us for a couple of years, but a number of things changed that made it feel less appropriate.

1. More and more of the work we were doing crossed the consumer/retailer barrier. From things like admin fees (transparently showing any additional compulsory fees that retailers charge), to retailer stores (helping consumers understand who they’re buying from and retailers showcase themselves), and price indicators (helping consumers be confident in the price of a vehicle, and retailers buy and sell vehicles with accurate knowledge of the market). This made the retailer/consumer distinction feel like unnecessary friction.
2. Enabling more of the car buying journey to take place online. As we started to work on things that help consumers do more online (get a price for a part-exchange, find cars they can get delivered to them, arrange finance online, and so on) we found more types of work that were distinct from things we’d done before. These types of processes involve making sure all these steps are clear to understand and work through — and involve us, car buyers, and car sellers all working together.
3. An increased maturity in our design systems, and investment in the representation of the Auto Trader brand throughout our products and experiences.
4. Expansion of the way that we used our data and insight into the automotive marketplace to help retailers, manufacturers, and others to understand market trends, buy and price the right stock, optimise their performance, and make themselves more efficient.

An emerging role

Within this context, we started to see collections of products & features that clustered together, serving similar user needs and requiring coherent thought.

We saw themes around:

• Discovery & core marketplace — helping people learn about, browse, get interested in, compare, and find a vehicle that might be right for them.
• Digital transactions — enabling people to work through the jobs they need to do to get into that next car (such as part-exchanging, arranging finance, making appointments to view, reserving, and so on).
• Advertising & retailer platform — providing a great platform to sell vehicles: setting up and representing your business, creating effective adverts, managing your vehicles, and optimising your advertising.
• Data & insight — understanding the market, sourcing and pricing vehicles effectively; understanding your advert and business performance on the platform.
• Brand & design systems — how our brand and visual identity is represented across experiences, & how we systemise the way that our products work to solve problems across the ecosystem.

Within these themes (or, as we’ve come to call them portfolios), individual teams were often doing great work with focus on their individual areas — which could be “enabling consumers to part-ex their vehicle with no haggling”, for example. But our users don’t experience features individually when they search for, buy, or sell a vehicle — they experience collections of features, data, and information across multiples days or weeks, and often more than one platform. So we needed to ensure coherent experiences.

And more than this, effectively implementing coherent features is a great baseline, but in the long run won’t be sufficient to have delighted users and customers (and so for us to be a success). Within these portfolios we need to have a direction of travel towards to a vision of a better future. And while design is definitely not the only contributor to thinking about this, it’s important that perspective is strongly represented.

Our new role

This new role was emerging organically, but we also wanted to look at what else worked elsewhere in Auto Trader. Auto Trader is a more flexible and non-hierarchical organisation than many others. It is also large enough to have role specialisms and levels of organisational and technical complexity, but small enough that it retains the direct dynamism of younger companies. We are action-oriented, and tend to prefer people who want to actively solve problems over the creation of bureaucracy.

Taking all this into account, the role we defined has three core elements:

1. People management of a small number of designers or researchers. This is focussed on pastoral care, mentoring, coaching, and career development. It is not about managing those people’s work or setting the tasks they will be doing, but looking after them and growing their design careers.
2. Bringing design coherence across a portfolio. This involves understanding how a whole range of things will work together as great experiences — and balancing small changes, bigger changes, or large projects, understanding that there is not a single “release” for any of these things, but continuous changes.
3. Being a key contributor to the vision and strategy for the future of the experiences within that portfolio. This is highly collaborative work, that helps identify what the future looks like; creating that with peers and helping others to understand and buy into that direction.

Explaining what it is

And this is how we’ve ended up with our “Portfolio Design Lead” role. Unfortunately for us, this isn’t a title that’s well-established, and is easy to misinterpret! We can’t find a title that seems to work any better, and it’s not easy to explain the role in a short job ad. Hence the long blog post!

We’re currently hiring for a Portfolio Design Lead who will be focussed on our Digital Transactions portfolio. This is all about enabling more of the car buying journey to take place online, and includes a bunch of fascinating service design and product design challenges. This is an area of significant growth and change for us, so is a great opportunity to play a part in shaping our future.

If you’d be interested in learning more about the role, or working at Auto Trader, please do get in touch.