5 things YOU can do to keep your designers
Are you losing designers faster than you can recruit them?
What a pity, because they are your best helpers in
- lowering your risk of failing in the market
- lowering your cost of development
- increasing the quality of your product or service
If you are really interested in keeping them, here are 5 things YOU can do:
1 : Study design
Don´t ask a designer what design is, what a designer does and why are you in this project? This is 2018, and design is a critical capability — Google it and read for hours and days. Do an online training. Don´t think you got it after reading shallow consultancy papers, read books! Study until you understand the difference between using design as styling, design as process or design as strategy.
TIP: You are not wasting your time, you can use design in your privat life too. e.g. service-designing the next party for your friends.
2 : Listen & learn from them
Design is an education as long as your own, and covers areas you have extremely little knowledge of. You will grow A LOT as a professional, leader and even as a person. You will find out that they make YOU better, your SOLUTIONS better, your TEAM work better, and your SUCCESS sweeter. Work with them on a project, and you will soon find out that your management consultants with a couple of your online coursera courses in design thinking are not designers — far from it.
TIP: Relax, the designers are not trying to take your job, in fact they would never ever want your job!
3 : Involve designers from the start
You have a major problem with your cost of development if you develop solutions without any deep user insight. It is very costly, risky and even embarrassing for you and your (most probably flopping) project team. Designers help you solve your WHY and WHAT questions, THEN the engineers can help you with the HOW! Therefore, the designers should be the main facilitators of your insight, ideation and solutions concept creation part — NOT join the project at the end.
TIP: Repeat loud 10 times : “Design will save us all a LOT of money”.
4 : Organize the designers in a design department
Designers became designers because they are creative. Creativity comes from playing and interchange of ideas. Don’t think they are individualists, most are really flock-sheep — they flourish in creative environments — among other creatives. They work in cross functional product or project teams, facilitating development processes and producing deliverables, but they MUST have a creative home where they are among their peers. Don´t leave a single designer abandoned in a department, and don´t split up design departments into small fractions spread out across the organization.
TIP: If you do, I guarantee you, most of them will leave! And since your need for design is increasing, you will have to rent them back at 3 times the cost.
5 : Give designers slack
Give them questions, not solutions. Give them time. Don´t care about when and where they work. Let them go to weird events, hackathons and conferences far away. Designers are not telling you how to code. They are not telling you which business models to use. Don´t tell them how to run user research, or how to run creative workshops, or how the design process should be structured. Let them run the show. Answer their weird questions, like “WHY are we making an app?” Let them be really quirky and take off in insane directions. Accept that it will be over the top according to your standard. Go with their flow.
TIP: Your next project will be more FUN, rewarding, and most likely more successful than any other project you have ever run.
Who am I to tell? Well, I am not a designer — I used to be an electrical engineer, worked in 8 years in technology & sales, 10 years as marketeer and the last 5 years I have been implementing design across Telenor. I took the time to study design from books and trainings, involved designers, worked with them, learned from them, respected them and gave them slack. However, overnight, a top down re-organization spread us out across 3 departments. In months they were all gone.
I learned it the hard way. It is painful.
Do YOU want to make the same mistakes?
Well, now you don’t have to.
