How to transition from an Individual Contributor to a Design Manager
Application process, onboarding, and reflection
I have gone through the process of internal transition from a design lead to a design manager at the beginning of this year. As this is one of the natural paths for career development, many people have asked me to share my process and experience. In this article, I will discuss my process of applying for the internal transfer, onboarding to the new role, and what you can expect if you do plan to transfer into a design management role.
Applying for an internal transfer
I went through the journey of applying for an internal transfer:
- Understanding the goals
- Communicating the desire and plans
- Looking for opportunities
- Applying for the job
- Planning the transition
You can check out the details about the journey from this article published by Yu Xin and me. But the truth was that I didn’t go through that smoothly.
Understanding the goals
Understanding why you want to become a manager is an important first step. There are different ways for you to move on with your career. For example, you can be a design leader without being a manager. You can also consider switching to another project, increasing your scope, changing domain and expertise, etc. Once you clearly understand your goal, you can explore different opportunities and find which ones best fit you.
It took me a lot of time to understand and clearly articulate my goals. I knew that I liked learning new things and taking on new challenges. But those were not strong enough reasons for me to go into design management. Eventually, through multiple conversations with different people in the team who pushed me to dig deeper, I finally understood my goals.
I want to create a safe and effective environment so more designers can deliver better value in their work.
Communicating the desire and plans
You need sponsors and support for a transition to happen. Especially for first-time managers, you need to convince the important stakeholders that you have the skill and potential to deliver the outcomes when given the opportunity. To get the buy-in, you need to communicate your desire and plans clearly to the people who can help.
I didn’t communicate very clearly in the beginning. In my 1:1 with my former manager, I briefly and occasionally mentioned that I would love to take on more responsibilities. I didn’t go into detail, so there were no ongoing conversations. I would recommend making it clear to the management team about your thoughts and plans by scheduling time with this dedicated topic. And this can be a series of conversations that last for months instead of happening over a week. This also helps them understand your thinking, help you to prepare, and look for opportunities for you.
Looking for opportunities
You can look for job openings on the internal sites where hiring manager information is shared. So you can leverage this information to search for the positions that suit you. For me, my current team was looking for a hands-on design manager to drive a small design team in Data Services. The expectation and scale of the team were great for the first-time manager. So that was a good fit. I will give you one more tip, though. The leadership team will have more up-to-date information as they are the ones that post the openings. It would be helpful to talk to them to figure out any upcoming positions available and ask them to keep an eye out for you. It might just be more effective and timely.
Applying for the job & Planning the transition
Applying for the job is the formal way to put you into consideration and the hiring pipeline. You might have to go through the whole interview process with different stakeholders. If you get the position, you would plan out the transition to offload your current projects to other designers. These two parts of the journey were quite straightforward for me. I will skip the details here. If everything goes well, you should get ready for your new job. You can start with onboarding.
Onboarding
Onboarding to the new role is the most exciting and overwhelming thing. There are three aspects of onboarding that you need to pay attention to — people, product, and process.
Onboarding with people (four groups)
As a people manager, you will have at least four groups you will need to interact with daily to succeed in your job. Here are the four groups:
- Your boss
- Your peers
- Your partners
- Your reports
Connecting with your boss is most straightforward. As a manager, you are in a position to deliver value and impact with your bigger team. Aligning with your boss’s goals and priorities will get you a better chance of success.
Connecting with your peers might be thought of as optional since they don’t directly impact you and your team. But I would disagree with that. In fact, I would think this connection can be most helpful for first-time managers. Your peers are in a similar position with you since you report to the same boss. They might be hired to deliver similar results as well. So you may be encountering similar team dynamics and issues. With their insights, you can be successful a little easier and sooner.
Connecting with your partners is the most important thing to do if you want to have tangible impacts on your team. Your partners are the ones that work on the same projects but represent different professions, such as product management, engineering, customer success, documentation, etc. This can be a challenging thing to do as it requires you to reach out to so many new people to build trust. And remote working surely makes it more challenging.
Connecting with your reports is the most rewarding thing to do from my perspective. You will be each other’s trusted partners in delivering value to the team. You would need to understand their drives for work, their challenges, their preference of working dynamics, etc.
It is hard to be a great manager if you don’t pay attention to these four types of connections. If you only care about your team but not your partners, you might create a small isolated design bubble for your team. If you only care about partners but not your reports, you might create a low-engaging team environment where you can’t leverage the team’s full potential.
Onboarding to products
As a design manager, you probably don’t have enough time or energy to deliver the product features or improvements. Nevertheless, a deep understanding of the product is required. Otherwise, you won't be able to talk strategy with your partners. Or you won’t be able to discuss design planning and quality control with your reports.
There are different ways to onboard a product. It is beneficial to talk to your partners to understand the business and technology of the product. You can also talk to your reports to understand their current experience and customers’ feedback. There are also different online platforms for you to get some hands-on products experience. For example, in VMware, we have Hands-on Lab, Pluralsight, and LinkedIn Learning to allow employees to keep learning new things. The challenge will be to understand what is enough for the first six months.
I tasked my team to prepare a product walkthrough with me so I could understand the products and our involvement in the overall product development. That was great practice for the reports to show off their knowledge and impact on the product as well. In the exercise, I wanted to understand who were our customers, why they wanted our products, who were our competitors, what was our current experience, what was our next focus, what kind of impact that the design team had made on the product experience in the past year, etc.
Onboarding to process
Different teams will probably have different processes. You need to know how different teams are doing planning, standup, review, retro, etc. You might have a better way for the team to adopt. But changing culture or process is a big undertaking. And this type of change requires a lot of buy-ins before any significant change can happen. So before you can do that, you need to truly understand the current process and people’s feedback about it.
Talk to different team members to understand how things are done. Look for feedback on things that are working and things that are dissatisfying for future improvement opportunities.
What to expect after becoming a manager
Many people asked me what has changed at work after becoming a manager. The biggest change was that I have many different threads of work happening at the same time. Some of them were just things that need to be done. For example, passing along the communication to the team or tracking design resource allocation on projects. There are also some exciting tasks where I can get instant satisfaction because I made an impact, such as giving and receiving feedback with my reports and partners.
Different types of work
I am in the process of categorizing different types of work that you would encounter as a manager so I can analyze how mature I am in different areas. Here are some categories that I have identified:
- Creating staffing plan
- Hire new team members
- Co-create career development plans with reports
- Set and track goals with reports
- Coach team members for different situations
- Set up communication channels and rituals
- Recognize team achievement and effort
- Etc.
Reflection
I was nervous and excited when I first got the job. I loved the expanded responsibilities and it was great for my growth. But I was also aware that I was very new to a lot of things and I wanted to give my team the best support. One thing I have learned was that you are not doing this alone. That is why you have a team, mentors, and friends. Your boss will be the one helping you with the things that you don’t know yet. And if the team collectively doesn’t have good knowledge on a topic, you can reach out externally for more help in the company. During this work-from-home time, many managers had to learn how to handle better support employees while working remotely and sometimes isolated. So collectively, VMware has created future-of-work workshops to help managers understand the challenges and taught managers to create a more empathetic work environment.
I have just finished 9 months in the design manager position. There are things like working dynamic issues and design process misalignment which still require a lot of continued effort to solve and improve. There were moments that I felt tired and dissatisfied for not achieving what I had in mind. But whenever there was a little win, I would be so happy and energized as I knew that winning for the team has a bigger impact. It is a marathon, not a sprint. I look forward to more partnerships to do things that will benefit the team and the company.
At last, I want to especially thank Jehad Affoneh, Afifa Tawil, and Manesh John for creating this opportunity for me. And I want to thank Sudeep Dasgupta, Emily Leahy, and Ashely Farr for their support in my daily work life. And I want to thank Kathryn O’Donnell, Kelly Weldon, and Joy Chen for being the wonderful team members that create such a rewarding team environment.
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