DESIGN MANAGEMENT

How to bring value as a design leader without getting hands-on

4 ideas for those who have stepped away from pushing pixels

I became a manager gradually and didn’t notice how I stopped creating mockups and prototypes, conducting testing sessions with users, and attending daily syncs with developers. One day, I woke up and realized the biggest value I could bring to the table had vanished.

These were my three greatest fears:

1. “The company might get rid of me in challenging times because I’m no longer the best designer on the team.”
2. “Managerial skills are universal: anyone without a design background can manage a group of designers.”
3. “Design hard skills are easy to observe and measure, while my managerial efforts will be invisible.”

Fortunately, most of my fears turned out to be false or exaggerated. In reality, there are many ways to bring value as a leader and stay “hands-on,” but in a different manner.

But before we dive into the main topic, let me say a few words about what is not a good way to bring value as a manager — so that you know what to watch out for.

Operational work trap

Most design leaders these days used to be designers, which is our strength and weakness at the same time. As you start managing a team, you’ll soon discover a new world of activities, tools, and methodologies, such as, for instance, the Employee Lifecycle — in addition to the familiar Design Thinking framework.

During this change of focus from design to designers, you may find yourself bogged down by an endless flow of non-design tasks:

• one-on-ones with team members,
• approving requests,
• weekly planning,
• organizing team-building,
• assigning tasks,
• resolving daily conflicts, and more.

These tasks never stop, and there is no clear end in sight.

At some point, you might think, “So, is this what management looks like? Is it really what I wanted?” You’ve set aside mockups, user flows, information architecture, and prototypes, and in the meantime, people-related tasks take up more of your time, eventually filling all the available space.

But the issue with operational work is that, despite being inevitable, it doesn’t offer much value for either of the parties:

• Your company won’t see operational work as highly valuable.
• Your team won’t appreciate it as much as you’d hope, given the amount of energy this work consumes every day.
• And finally, you won’t feel fulfilled by focusing solely on operational tasks.

Think about this: why would someone turn a seasoned designer with a ton of hands-on experience and leadership aspirations into a kind of operational assistant?

So, maybe you should not fall for operational work that much and abandon your design expertise in favor of repeated “people work.” But how, then, can you find a balance between the responsibility for design and the people who produce this design?

There is one more interesting framework I haven’t mentioned yet — the 8-step Change Model by John Kotter. Funny enough, it’s circular, too. In my view, it illustrates how a design manager (and generally, any manager) can provide the most value to the team and organization by driving positive change on a broader scale than individual designers.

Change is a powerful area where you can make a real impact — without competing with your team in design craft or getting lost in endless operational tasks. Of course, it’s essential to remain critical of any framework and not treat it as a one-size-fits-all solution, but these three recognized models offer a helpful way to systematize the responsibilities of a design leader.

Now, let’s talk about several examples of change projects that you can drive in your design team.

Idea 1. Fix design team meetings

Based on my experience with numerous teams and the sheer number of memes, meetings are one of the most hated aspects of work for many designers. Yet, they remain a popular tool for fostering engagement, transparency, alignment, and balanced decision-making. Andy Budd captures this perfectly in one of his posts:

Meetings are like salt or spices in food: too little — and the result is bland; too much — and you ruin the dish.

The absence of meetings is terrible. It results in:

• conflicting priorities,
• effort duplication,
• ignorance of a broader context,
• lack of awareness,
• poor knowledge-sharing.

But having too many meetings isn’t any better since it causes:

• anxiety,
• deficit of time for hands-on work,
• lack of focus because of endless interruptions,
• and, ironically, poor preparation for those very meetings!

If this sounds painfully familiar, as a design leader, you can streamline meetings by:

• setting clear goals and agendas for each meeting;
• appointing team members to own and conduct different meetings;
• canceling gatherings whose usefulness has expired;
• adjusting the duration and frequency of meetings to match the depth and scope of the topics discussed.

While it sounds easy, the tricky part is adopting the changes. It’s not just about you identifying the problem and solution; it’s about ensuring everyone on the team shares the same vision and is motivated to follow through. My team ran a couple of workshops where we mapped out our current meetings, voiced concerns and needs, and collaboratively designed a new setup for team gatherings.

We utilized a monthly calendar view to map out all existing meetings and highlighted the overlapping time slots where team members in both Europe and the USA could participate. While we had a specific list of needs and pain points that I’d prefer to keep confidential, many typical designers’ needs can be addressed through dedicated meetings, such as:

• define priorities → planning sessions;
• lack of alignment → design sprints and various team challenges;
• get early feedback → design critique;
• tackle strategic initiatives → design workshops and discussions;
• show design impact → quarterly reports for top management;
• learn new skills → internal lectures and educational workshops;
• showcase finished work → design demos, etc.

A pragmatic approach to meetings helps match the tool to the need. After such a workshop, you may realize, for example, that you don’t need planning sessions twice a week, but giving your team a platform in front of product management could make a real difference.

Idea 2. Drive UX consistency

Not a single day passes by without designers talking about consistency and its importance for user experience. So, why not tackle this topic with your design team?

But let’s talk about real consistency — not just using similar buttons or colors. Here are a few examples of deeper inconsistencies that significantly impact users’ behavior and impression of your product:

• Notifications are more detailed and informative on desktop than mobile, leading users to avoid the mobile version even though they spend half their workday in the field.
• There are five different ways to add a new instance across an ecosystem of three digital products, meaning users often require long training just to learn basic actions.
• The search function behaves differently in each product, with varying filters and sorting options, with or without an advanced mode, etc. It forces users to relearn how to find information depending on which part of the platform they’re using.

As you can see, these issues extend well beyond button shapes or icon line thickness. If user efficiency problems remain unresolved, visual cohesion will be the last thing users care about. So, how do you resolve those issues? One of the ways is to establish design principles.

Properly created principles do not dictate similarity; instead, they propose a way of thinking. Of course, you cannot automate design decision-making, but you can help people focus on what’s most valuable to customers and users. Unfortunately, it’s common to encounter generic statements labeled as design principles that aren’t helpful and end up in the Confluence graveyard shortly after they’re created.

Useful design principles involve choosing between two positive values rather than stating the obvious. For instance, “be user-centered” is a given; no one questions whether software should be user-centered. The real question is how “user-centered” you want to be in the conditions of investors’ pressure and a competitive market that doesn’t forgive you even the slightest delay.

Here are several examples of tough trade-offs:

• Customizable vs. uniform: Customizable software caters to a wide range of customer needs; uniform solutions are easier to maintain and uphold high standards.
• Usable vs. feasible: Prioritizing usability creates a better user experience; reducing extensive research allows for faster delivery of new features.
• Global vs. local: Global solutions streamline maintenance and free teams to focus on innovation; local adaptations make the software relevant to specific cultures or markets.
• Minimalist vs. clear: Minimalist designs reduce clutter and focus on essentials; detailed and precise labels and descriptions ensure users grasp everything quickly.
• Robust vs. creative: Robust systems are reliable and resilient; creative solutions introduce unique experiences.

What would you sacrifice, and what would you emphasize in the software your team is building? It’s tough to answer without thorough research and a deep understanding of your domain, business context, and customer landscape. However, once you have those insights, here are three steps I follow when considering design principles:

1. Decision-making challenges: What tough choices regularly come up during product development in your company? What trade-offs have you made? Were those trade-offs systemic and affecting anything vital? (If you don’t experience a challenge with something, there is no need for a principle.)
2. Business implications: How have inconsistent decisions and trade-offs affected the business, whether directly or indirectly? How have they impacted customer satisfaction or user experience? (If nothing crucial is impacted, you don’t need a principle.)
3. Customer-centric priorities: What choices will serve your customers’ best interest? What would you prioritize when you have to choose between conflicting product aspects?

To implement these design principles, start by addressing one or two key challenges with your team, making sure to involve other stakeholders in the process. Keep the principles visible and use them as a guide for making decisions. The goal is not just to create them but to ensure they actively shape your product’s evolution.

Idea 3. Start a transversal project

In 1967, computer programmer Melvin Conway expressed an idea known as Conway’s Law: the structure of software mirrors the communication structure of organizations producing this software. That’s why working in digital tech, especially in leadership, requires a deep understanding of team dynamics and how complex systems are created collaboratively by hundreds of people.

Now, let’s get back to design.

In a typical team, designers are often embedded within different squads, each focusing on a specific domain or topic. It helps designers to dive deep into a particular area, work on end-to-end solutions, and own a portion of the total user experience.

However, customers and users don’t care about your team’s internal structure or whether some parts of your product are exceptionally well-designed by top-performing individuals. If the product as a whole is frustrating, users will be generally negative about it. This is where design management comes into play.

Design leaders hold “horizontal” roles, acting as unifying elements that align designers around shared goals and directions. Unfortunately, using this horizontal position to its full potential isn’t easy. Each designer’s capacity is often fully occupied with projects from their respective product domain, with little space left for you there.

For example, your company is developing a complex B2B platform for large manufacturing companies. This platform is made up of a dozen apps that serve different purposes, such as identifying production bottlenecks or planning maintenance to minimize machine downtime. You manage a team of 6 designers, each working within their own domain team, focusing on different, loosely connected apps.

Beyond the app-specific issues, you’ll encounter platform-wide problems: unclear global navigation, disjointed cross-app workflows, and poor overall information architecture. Since you are accountable for the design excellence of the entire platform, you need to drive large-scale changes.

So, how do you “book” a portion of your direct reports’ time for a valuable global initiative? How do you ensure designers won’t burn out being torn apart by their domain-specific projects and your projects on top of that? Briefly speaking, you need to build a business case:

• What problem are you trying to solve? Build a logical chain from design to customers, users, and business KPIs.
• What is the vision of success? In other words, describe what you expect to get at the end of the project.
• What is the expected outcome? Clarify the measurable and tangible changes that will result from the initiative.
• Why is this urgent now? Explain the cost of delay.
• Whom do you need to be involved? Determine which designers or other team members are crucial for this project.
• What is a preliminary plan? Lay out an initial roadmap of stages, tasks, and rough estimates.

By clearly outlining these points and pitching them to all key stakeholders, you’ll be able to gain their support, secure time for the design team, and ensure a coordinated effort across both domain-specific and global tasks.

Let’s go back to the example I started above. If the differentiator of that B2B platform is enabling complex, end-to-end workflows, but users are still confused about getting around and working efficiently, then you need to analyze and streamline cross-app journeys. You’ll need to justify why this initiative requires around 20% of each designer’s time over the next 5 months and what the company will get at the end.

Just as every product manager fills their day and team’s backlog with the most valuable tasks, as a design manager, you should prioritize large, “horizontal,” transversal topics that impact the entire product and its overall user experience.

Idea 4. Lay the groundwork for team collaboration

You don’t need to become a manager to genuinely care about colleagues’ work styles and how to collaborate efficiently with them. However, when you step into a leadership role — whether at a new company or through internal promotion — building solid relationships with your team becomes essential. I would even say that it largely defines both your personal success and that of your team.

People are far more complex than interfaces or usability heuristics, and it often takes time to figure out how to work effectively with each individual. You might also realize that it’s not just about your relationship with your team members; they may struggle to collaborate well with one another.

Here are just several things that depend on personality and are hard to discern from a person’s job title or role:

• communication habits;
• preferred working hours;
• focus time and distraction tolerance;
• feedback perception;
• thinking style;
• passions and areas of interest;
• workspace setup;
• perception of time, etc.

So, how can you approach this situation in a structured, holistic way? My go-to approach is to ask people to compose “collaboration profiles” and let others know how to collaborate with them. Below, I describe three examples of tools you can use for this purpose.

The “GlobeSmart Profile” by Aperian is a questionnaire designed to help team members understand each other’s work-related traits without delving into overly personal territory. The main output is a diagram that shows a person’s position along axes, such as “Independent — Interdependent,” “Risk — Certainty,” or “Direct — Indirect.” In addition, the profile offers personalized recommendations for how you, with your unique set of traits, can collaborate effectively with each team member.

The “Manual of Me” framework by Mattew Knight is an online work profile-building tool where team members answer a series of open-ended questions in detail. The result is a narrative highlighting key aspects of each team member’s work style. The questions cover essential areas like what inspires you, how you prefer to receive feedback, and your communication habits, allowing team members to share important information in their own words.

Inspired by “Manual of Me,” I created the “Handbook of Me” template and published it on Figma Community. It is adapted to the design industry and is more visual than the original. My version includes sections on what team members need to do great work, their personal boundaries, communication preferences, and more.

To sum up, any structured approach can effectively improve mutual understanding and seamless collaboration within a team. The key is to ensure transparency and obtain full consent from team members. They should never feel like subjects in a corporate experiment or being judged for the way they organize their lives.

Additional ideas

As a design manager, there’s much more you can tackle. Here are a few ideas to expand on:

• Establish quarterly presentations for top management to showcase the design team’s impact on the business.
• Develop a system of global UX metrics for all team members to integrate into their work.
• Anticipate the new skills your team will need in the next 1–2 years and arrange relevant training or mentorship ahead of time.
• Organize Q&A sessions for the design team with customer support, sales, marketing, product management, etc., so the team can gain insights from different perspectives.

Summary

1. Think in systems instead of design solutions

As a manager, your responsibility shifts from creating individual designs to overseeing the designs produced by your team. Your greatest value lies in curating and enhancing their collective output, amplifying what they do well, and ensuring that various issues don’t recur. By the way, there is an awesome book about system thinking by Donella Meadows.

2. Keep operational work within reasonable boundaries

Operational work is a bottomless pit that will consume as much time and effort as you’re willing to give it. If you were a hands-on designer before being promoted to manager, getting bogged down in operational tasks isn’t the best use of your expertise, right?

3. Initiate and implement systemic changes

When you move up a level in the organizational hierarchy, your scope and scale of work should expand as well. As someone overseeing multiple designers, you’re in a position to see repeated issues and significant opportunities that, when addressed, can benefit your entire team.