Stop asking for more designers

When you ask for design resources, does it feel like making a wish or playing the lottery?

As a design leader I have spent years trying to convince the business that I need more full time roles on my team.

Let me tell you about what I have learned and hopefully it leads to you getting the resources you need for your team.

Ask the right questions

First of all, stop asking for more roles and instead start asking some other questions.

Business Strategy and Priorities

Unless its already perfectly clear, the first questions I start asking are about strategy, goals and priorities — what is the business trying to achieve and why.

Understanding these things is important for two reasons, first of all we need to think about how design can help the business execute on that strategy or achieve those goals, this helps us understand where our teams can have the biggest impact and can help our teams show meaningful value.

The other reason is that understanding priorities allows us to focus limited resources on the most important things, and allows us to say no to items that are simply not a priority for the business.

This alone can have a huge impact on our resource plans.

What is expected from Design?

The next questions I start asking, is to ensure I understand what is expected from the design team.

Design can contribute in may ways. At a minimum, we are responsible for what I call production design, this is “feature work” and is often the bread and butter of what we do. It’s the work we do to make sure that engineers know what to build, and to ensure our customers have a great experience with the new features we are building.

Another way we contribute is by refining what we already have. We can deliver a ton of value to customers by focussing on improving existing functionality and if you are lucky the business understands this and you have designers and engineers who focus on this in addition to production design.

Finally, design can have some if its biggest impact with what I call strategic design. This is where we look out to the horizon to help the business paint a clear picture of what the future could look like. Strategic design is also about paying attention to all the connective tissue that exists between features, and in some cases between products. Often when we are heads down in production design we lose sight of the forest for the trees and strategic design resources ensure that our features and products come together in a holistic way.

Why is this important? Well, we need to understand what level of contribution the business is expecting so that we can deliver at the appropriate service level. No point trying to resource for future facing strategic work, if the business is just expecting production design, and if the business is asking for strategy work, but you only have production design roles, then you can identify the gap.

Now, express what you need to be successful

Now is when we are ready to ask for resources, but rather than just as asking for more roles, you are in the position to express what your team needs in order to be successful based on the strategy and priorities of the business, and the level at which the business expects your team to deliver.

Key Take-away

This is the key thing I have learned, and I hope you find it useful.

Our business leaders want to make sure teams have what they need to deliver their work and they want to know that work being done is in service to their strategy.

By taking the time to understand the business priorities, ensure we understand what is expected of our teams, we can then figure out what we need to operate at that level, and respond to the business with what we need.

When we position our requests in this way we are way more likely to be successful.