Is managing the only way to grow as a designer? How I went from manager to expert.
“Go for it, it’s a great opportunity!”
That’s how my friends reacted when I told them that Qonto offered me the chance to manage the brand design team.
The offer was tempting. Beyond the salary, being in charge of the brand design studio for one of the most attractive French scale-ups was thrilling. I then decided to embark on the most rewarding and challenging professional experiences I have undertaken to date.
I had made up my mind about this new role. I had read Julie Zhuo’s very good book, “The Making of a Manager”, then I talked to people who were in the same role in other startups, and I also consumed a lot of online literature on the subject.
By the way, I like this quote from the book:
The job of a manager is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.
Consequently, for me, the role of the manager was first to help the team deliver projects with the best possible quality. It’s a “hands-on” job that is based on regular co-working sessions with team members who have eventual issues with a current subject.
It’s also exciting to think about recruitment, to look for profiles, to use your network, to go to meetups…Finally, the idea is to create the best possible team - composed of complementary profiles - and to offer them a wide variety of projects to keep them motivated and inspired.
In short, the goal of the manager is to make sure that the team works on the right subjects, at the right time, and at the same pace as the other teams.
Through this role, I have discovered that a good manager is also someone who asks lots of questions. At Qonto, we usually assume that a successful meeting is when the manager has learned new information about his team’s work. Asking “why”, getting to the bottom of problems, and tracing the history of the project to find flaws and areas of improvement, is an exciting and very rewarding part of the job.
Yet, after a year in this role, my need to be more involved in the day-to-day production resurfaced. I didn’t feel that I belonged in the manager’s daily tasks anymore, and I felt that this role was no longer the best way to showcase my skills. Mathieu, my manager at the time, listened to my feelings, and after some time of reflection, we agreed that I would thrive more in an “expert” role.
At Qonto, the expert role is quite broad. That’s what I liked best. I would define it as follows:
An expert is someone who has the ability to bring all the teams working on a given subject to the best possible result. An expert develops expertise-related skills, learns how to improve them, and then, how to coach others on those skills. It is about expertise-related leadership and radiance.
And it’s the notion of a team that is the key here. Because in all hyper-growth companies, the number one risk (which happens in the majority of cases) is losing the notion of teamwork. When a company grows fast, that’s exactly when gaps are widened.
Here are some examples:
- You don’t know who to contact in case you need a translation for a project,
- You may wait for validation from another team’s manager on a subject that’s been going on for 2 weeks, etc…
All of this leads to frustration from the teams, quality defects in the delivered projects, and in the end, a general lack of internal alignment.
So part of the manager and expert roles at Qonto is to set up the right tools and working methods to bridge the gaps between the teams.
Thus, there is a certain correlation between managers and experts at Qonto. Except that the manager focuses on people’s development and provides them with useful tools to help them in their work. The expert focuses on the projects, the core of the production, sets up, and puts into action the tools that were developed with the manager.
Standards, the recipe for success
Standards are part of the tools used to align teams. At Qonto, a standard is a document containing the knowledge acquired in the field when completing a given task (also called the “Recipe”). With this document available to the Qonto community, anyone working on the same subject will get up to speed, thanks to the knowledge acquired by his peers.
Standards are essential to align teams: they allow everyone to have a clear reference concerning the quality of a typical Qonto project. They help to build a clear basis to discuss when a project does not go as planned.
Experts and managers are the guardians of the writing and quality of these standards.
In hindsight, I realize how lucky I am to have been able to be a team leader and now an expert. There is a tendency to oppose these paths, whereas they are complementary in many ways. Qonto understands this and has set up two complementary career paths that can be navigated in both directions: the Specialist track, which allows you to evolve by strengthening your expertise, and the Manager track, which allows you to evolve through people management.
As a manager, leading a team has taught me to develop my long-term vision: what will the Brand Design Studio look like in 1 or 2 years? How should we recruit twice as many designers? How can we keep the same level of quality while recruiting one person per month?
Managing people taught me to better understand how to measure the impact of my work. Why is it important for Qonto to work on this project right now? What is the place of this project in the strategy? These are all questions that help to understand the level of investment to inject into a project.
Finally, managing has taught me to listen. To listen to the people in my team, to listen to other teams, and to listen to the customer. To be more interested in others and their way of seeing and interpreting things. So by managing a team, you develop empathy; and isn’t a skill to develop for any designer?
In a nutshell, we can see that as a Designer, management is far from being the only way to evolve. The world of startups offers a thousand possibilities. It is by remaining curious and open to challenges that one can discover new paths that they had not even imagined before.
