Expert Management: UX Patterns for Managers

Five-ish years ago, Vanessa Van Schyndel invited Jared M. Spool to speak to Yammer Product about patterns in UX Design. Pardon an old memory, but he discussed those patterns as:

• Self Design — you are representative of the customer and can intuit their needs and mental models of interaction.
• Expert Design — realizing you aren’t the customer, you must study and turn your team into experts about the customer.

This rang true for me, because the Yammer I joined in 2010 had been self designed almost entirely by David Sacks. Three years later we had large analytics and research functions. We simply couldn’t intuit the needs of a butcher working at a Jewel-Osco in Peoria or the mental models of pharma researchers at AstraZeneca in Switzerland.

Self vs. expert design popped into my head years later, as I was considering running Engineering at AnyPerk. I’d had a total of four years of management experience at this point, running Product, Design, and Business Development teams across a few companies, but I hadn’t managed engineers.

I hadn’t been employed as an engineer for nine years, was it crazy to manage a team of them?

Mentors convinced me it wasn’t, but that management challenges would be different when I couldn’t lean on my skills in the role. In effect, I needed to move from self management to expert management.

• Self Management — you are representative of the function and can intuit the needs and mental models of the team.
• Expert Management — realizing you’ve never performed that function, you must study and become an expert about the role.

Comparatively, self management is easy. Not that it’s easy to be a great manager, but it’s a lot easier when you have personally experienced an issue your employee brings you. The two biggest challenges of self management are micro-management, particularly when your people make a mistake, and knowing when self management is no longer effective.

Expert management means studying, finding mentors, over-communicating, and experimentation. It means hiring leaders who know what they’re doing and empowering them as they integrate their expertise into the organization.

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. — Steve Jobs LinkedIn Bait

Expert management is difficult and uncomfortable, which is why most people fail at it. They’re assigned some team they don’t understand, don’t bother learning about it, and wonder why engineers keep leaving, sales are declining, new designs look like bank software, etc., etc.

You don’t need to be a great engineer, sales rep, or designer, but the goal of management is to create an environment where your team can do great work. That means understanding and becoming conversant in your people’s cares and challenges, figuring out what they’re good at and whether you’re maximizing that, and how people in that function fail, what that looks like, and how to support them.

Expert management takes hard work, time, practice, humility, and experimentation. I’ve run Product, Design, Data, Copywriting, Engineering, a few different versions of Business Development, Support, Operations, and IT and I’m no expert! But I believe the process of expert management is key to happy employees and hitting goals.