Captain, coach, and counselor: The multifaceted role of a product design lead

The leap from product designer to design lead sounds relatively straightforward. At least, it did to me… until I actually experienced it.

In August 2020, I was offered a new product design lead role. I jumped at the chance, excited to stretch and grow my leadership skills. I’d be leading a team of 3 designers, working on the most strategic product in the IBM Security portfolio. At IBM, the design lead does not functionally manage folks, but they do provide day-to-day direction on projects and ensure that business commitments are met. “Let’s goooo!!” I said with incredible enthusiasm and naïveté. After 6 years of practicing software design, I didn’t expect becoming a design lead to have a huge learning curve.

What I found, though, was that the shift from delivering designs to empowering others to deliver designs required fundamentally different skills.

I had worked under some fantastic team leads, but it didn’t take long to realize I was flying blind. My scope of responsibilities felt large and ambiguous, boiling down to “make sure your team succeeds.” My predecessor in the role was leaving the company and there weren’t any helpful resources to show me the way. We were also in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, with designers who had once been clustered together across a few offices now all working remotely. I had stumbled into the position of being a leader, mentor, decision-maker, peer, friend, negotiator, therapist, and more. There was no playbook for this scenario.

So here I am nearly three years later, taking a moment to reflect on my journey. I’ve found that being a design lead is the weirdest hybrid role. It’s all of the responsibility of leading projects and a team, without the authority of managing the people. Through the highs and lows, I’ve learned a bunch about myself, my team, and my cross-functional collaborators.

I’ve selected three of the most common “hats” that a design lead wears, based on my experience and the experience of other design leads at IBM. These certainly don’t encompass the entire multifaceted role of a design lead, but I believe they form a simple framework to make sense of the design lead experience. Let’s dive in.

A design lead is a CAPTAIN.

For me, the word “captain” conjures up the image of a ship captain, guiding their vessel and commanding their crew. A captain has leadership and authority. They look out across the sea, plot a path toward their final destination, and keep watch for unexpected troubles.

I’m no sailor, but I do feel the weight of keeping my team on course, whether it’s stormy or smooth sailing. As a design lead, it’s up to me to see the big picture, understand the business commitments and desired outcomes, and provide direction to the team to get from a problem to a solution. The design lead “steers the ship,” so to speak, helping the team stay on course and pivot appropriately when they encounter obstacles.

As a good leader, a design lead sees themself as a part of the team and recognizes that they cannot deliver great outcomes without their team. The design lead can be decisive when needed, but isn’t authoritarian. They strive to foster a culture of healthy collaboration. They cast a focused, inspiring vision that the team buys into and executes against.

Practically, the design lead needs to manage design projects and stakeholders with decisiveness and authority. Of course, they don’t do this in isolation. Excellent communication and collaboration are key in all directions: up to executives, down to the design team, and out to the cross-functional team. Solid negotiation skills and flexibility are required to achieve workable trade-offs and team alignment.

Core practices of the captain:

• Design roadmap. The design lead maintains the design roadmap, which should be populated with prioritized, near-term business commitments. Close collaboration with cross-functional peers is essential here, particularly with product management, as the design lead seeks to prioritize innovation and great UX alongside other business priorities.
• Project management. The design lead needs to manage the nitty-gritty details of the project, including planning and tracking the work, facilitating agile ceremonies, clearly communicating project timelines and milestones, and resolving blockers for the team. The design lead shapes the processes and boundaries that help their team stay on track and deliver successfully.
• Stakeholder alignment. The design lead has to stay in close sync with cross-functional stakeholders, including product management, development, and architecture. Core responsibilities include garnering buy-in and alignment, casting vision for what could be, and negotiating UX trade-offs based on technical constraints. Importantly, a design lead provides “air cover” to their designers, acting as a buffer so they can focus on delivering their work rather than navigating misalignment.

A design lead is a COACH.

Picture with me a football coach, who runs practices and drills before a big game, then gives tactical direction and encouragement during the game to empower their team to win. They are focused on setting the bar for excellence, improving the skills of each team member through repetition, and teaching the individuals to work together as a team for collective success. Though the coach doesn’t play on the day of the big game, they deeply understand the sport and can offer well-informed guidance to help team members perform at their best.

I prefer arts and crafts to athletics, and I had to double check these sports references with my sports-loving husband 😉 But if we take out the football references, we’ve got a spot on description of a design lead. Before I landed in this role, I didn't understand the extent to which I’d be empowering others, helping my designers get reps to improve their skills, and coaching them to focus on our shared goals and successes. It was a jarring transition to shift from frequently outputting my own deliverables to empowering others to efficiently output excellent work.

The design lead sets the bar for high quality, user-centric experiences and gives the team feedback to ensure that their work is up to par. They must deeply understand the domain and have expert design craft, in order to mentor their team, provide necessary context, and model the skills they want their folks to develop. Then they need to step back to let their team take ownership of an outcome.

I’ve found that the design lead has to avoid the temptation to just give their team the answers or do the work themselves. Though these behaviors might produce short-term wins or quickly unblock the team, a design lead must focus on the long game. They are coaching their team members to become experts in their own right — teaching them to fish, if you will. The best coaches empower others to arrive at their own conclusions, knowing that the very best learning happens through self-discovery.

Practically, the design lead needs to understand the skills and interests of their team members in order to assign suitable work and ensure business commitments are met. The design lead may need to try different combinations of people and projects to see what arrangement produces the best outcomes. The design lead will also never be far removed from the work itself; they should regularly contribute deliverables, both to model great craft for the team and to keep up their own skills.

Core practices of the coach:

• Design critiques. The design lead should provide regular feedback on the work their designers are producing, in order to get to the best possible outcomes. Regular feedback helps designers improve their skills and their craft, gives them new ideas to consider, and invites team collaboration. Critiques offer a chance to foster a culture of empathy and transparency, with designers seeking to build each other up and make each other (and the team) better.
• One-on-one meetings with designers. A design lead should meet regularly with their designers, in order to get to know them as people and understand their interests, motivations, and career goals. Though a design lead is not a people manager, they do have a shared responsibility to help designers be successful and grow in their careers. A design lead achieves this by getting to know their designers’ strengths and weaknesses, then matching them to appropriate assignments in order to do their best work.
• Mentoring new team members. A design lead is the primary person responsible for orienting new designers to the product, domain, and team practices. They should work to mentor new folks on what’s expected and support them as they learn the required skills.

A design lead is a COUNSELOR.

As I consider the strengths of a counselor, I picture an individual who is a great listener, is able to reflect back what they’re hearing, and who encourages growth. Rather than merely giving advice, a good counselor strives to empower an individual to process their lived experiences and come to their own conclusions. A counselor is not responsible for their client’s mental health, but partners with the client on their journey.

Not prepared to field this kind of emotion from your team? No kidding, neither was I. I felt like a magnet for venting and troubleshooting tension. Over time I realized this happened because design leads are perfectly positioned to get raw emotions from all sides, including from designers and stakeholders. Your designers may share difficulties with you that they wouldn’t share with their manager, hopeful that you’ll have a quick fix.

To avoid long bouts of unproductive venting or fielding 10,000 Slack DMs during a team conflict, I’ve found that I have to be proactive about cultivating healthy team culture and regularly checking in on team health and happiness. If the design lead doesn’t own this, chances are that no one will. The design lead is in a crucial position to set the tone for the team — is this a safe space to fail without judgment? Do we actually value collaboration? Do we care about each other as people? Can I expect to be respected and taken seriously when I share ideas?

Practically, the design lead also needs to lead out in recognizing folks for growth and great work. By taking time to reflect, especially in a whole-team setting like a retrospective, the design lead sets the expectation that reflection is a valuable practice. They show that it’s great to celebrate wins and to learn from things that didn’t work. The design lead is a valuable advocate for individuals and a champion for healthy ways of working as a team.

Core practices of the counselor:

• Team retrospectives. The design lead should regularly lead retrospectives with the team to reflect on what has been going well, what is not going well, and what needs to change. The design lead sets the critical expectation that honesty is encouraged and everyone has a voice. In my experience, retros are the single best team practice for building mutual respect and trust among team members.
• Team culture. The design lead has so much influence in fostering healthy team culture, which encompasses everything from collaboration, respect, inclusivity, to growth-mindedness, innovation, compassion, and more. They should incorporate ways of working that promote these values and squash practices that detract from them.
• Team member recognition. The design lead needs to be the loudest champion for their designers, recognizing great teamwork, great improvement, individual achievements, and even birthdays and service anniversaries. They should reflect and celebrate often, ensuring that their people feel seen and appreciated, and perhaps spotting growth that an individual has not recognized for themself.

Now that I have journeyed through the design lead role, I genuinely believe that it’s the most difficult role in the design career journey, given the number of hats that design leads are expected to wear. And yet, it’s a position that I think every designer should experience at some point. The only way is through it! Just like the children’s book says:

“We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it.” (We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, 1989)

With the challenge of being a design lead comes immense, hard-won growth as a designer and leader. My hope is that with this simple framework of a design lead as captain, coach, and counselor, you’ll feel better equipped to take on these responsibilities for yourself.

Robyn Johnson is a design manager at IBM. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions. Big thanks to Cameron Calder, Lynn Harding, and Farzana Sedillo for helping make this article shine ✨