How can we become better design managers
5 ways to boost your design team’s performance.
Six people around a coffee table, locked in a feisty argument.
The above doesn’t describe a miniature enactment of 12 angry men but a group of design professionals, at different stages of their careers, passionately voicing their thoughts on how to become a top-notch design leader.
That coffee table is where I spent a good chunk of my last Saturday. And this blog is an attempt to document the key takeaways that might help budding design leaders.
Who is this for? Anyone who leads a design team of any kind, in any capacity. In fact, the concepts here can be employed by managers across industries. Let’s jump right in!
Focus on inputs
A large part of a manager’s duties is dispersing information above and below their station in an organization. However, managers tend to naturally adopt an output-focused vision for everything they do. This is, in part, because organizations, too, overwhelmingly reward outcome-based thinking.
An overbearing focus on outcomes can blind you to the inefficiencies of the inputs in your team’s production cycle.
As a design manager, your performance is directly linked to the quality of the output your team produces. However, a good design leader understands that the output is also a function of the input. Feed your team better information and you’ll see them grow their design muscles.
Clear, unambiguous, and contextual inputs almost always have a positive effect on the quality of output. Therefore, it makes sense for managers to take stock of what information they offer to their team, and how they do it.
Don’t just tell them what needs to be done. Instead, inform them about why we’re doing, what we’re doing. Give them a compass to where you want them to reach instead of a map with clearly outlined trails to take. Through this approach, you’ll encourage exploratory thinking, problem-solving, and a figure-it-out attitude in your team. Moreover, this approach allows your best people to thrive which, in turn, helps in the team’s growth and retention.
One thing to be careful about with this approach is to not control the input (what your team knows) but instead optimize it for your team (how clear are all the inputs).
Allow space for failures
Failure is an inevitable part of the design process. Since so much of great design depends on moving along exploratory hikes of creative thinking, it’s natural that some of these wanderings bear no fruit.
Good design teams have a knack for embracing failure.
This, in turn, makes them readily welcoming to rapid iterative design processes.
Failure is also essential when it comes to upgrading the competency of your team. The way to upskill is through failure. “I’m never going to have all the solutions, but I’ll always be 100% committed to finding them.” is a good mantra for design leaders everywhere.
One framework that we routinely employ at SimplePlan to identify opportunities for improvement and competency upgrades is the competency-consequence matrix. People learn most effectively when they are given all the context to a problem but very minimal hand-holding. This is best achieved for tasks that have low levels of consequence. Hence, they make the best tasks to train someone on and help them upskill.
Identify The Limiting Factor
In any process, there is usually a step that has the most overbearing effect on the quality of output. In the production management paradigm, this is often referred to as the Limiting Factor. In simpler terms, this step, when optimized to its highest extent will return the highest gains for that process.
Imagine you’re a cook in a diner. You get an order for eggs, toast, and coffee. What determines how you should structure your production? Since the coffee is already in a pot and toast takes a minute to pop up, how fast and well you make your eggs will have the maximum impact on the quality of your order. Hence, making eggs is the limiting step here.
Different design teams have different limiting factors. If you’re a design leader wondering how you can manifold your team’s performance, it helps to identify and then optimize limiting factors as it propels the rate and quality of your team’s output over a long-term period.
In 2019, a branding team onboarded me to help identify gaps in their team’s workflow. We found out that an inordinate amount of the team’s time gets spent gathering project information and task details spread across different platforms like mail, slack, and other communication channels. We experimented with adding an information consolidation step in their workflow wherein before a project begins, the project lead has to collate all information and put it in one central repository (we chose Milanote for this — shoutout to Ollie Campbell).
While this did an additional step in the team’s workflow, it cut down the overall production time to 60% since teams were now not spending chunks of their valuable time scouring emails for minor yet critical pieces of information.
Developing Decision Frameworks
All of us deploy decision trees for everyday tasks — most people, however, deploy them subconsciously.
On any given day, design managers have to take numerous decisions across a large spectrum — from what layout to move forward with to whom to hire in your team as well as various other stakeholder-centered decisions.
While all of these decisions can surely be taken care of intuitively, and through on-the-spot data and information analysis, deploying decision frameworks and mental models can help improve your decision-making. The real value of such frameworks can be felt on bad days — days when there are just too many fires to put out and/or when you’re not at peak performance. On such days, intuition might fail you leading to sub-optimal decision-making.
A good design leader fosters a culture of systems-thinking in his/her team as well.
One example of a decision framework that we regularly apply at SimplePlan is that of ‘Inversion’. Let’s say, we have to design a checkout flow that involves a stage where the user has to fill a form with their personal information. The linear and natural way to go about designing here is to deploy our pre-existing mental models of how forms are.
However, through inversion, we can ask what would lead to a user abandoning the checkout at the ‘Form’ stage. This question encourages an alternative way of thinking where we try to find reasons for failure. And through these reasons, we can work backward and identify hidden spots that might have been invisible otherwise.
Another mental model that I deploy with a high frequency is asking “what would this look like if it were easy?” The answers to this, regardless of the problem at hand, are often springboards to a clearer and more strategic solution.
Farnam Street (Shane Parrish) has an amazing collection of mental models and frameworks that are worth diving into for anyone in a leadership role.
Take control — build your own team
Many a time, when design ICs are promoted to leadership roles, they are told to manage existing teams. In highly focused and consistent organizations where all decisions are taken through a single company-wide strategic lens, this is usually not a problem. On the other hand, in organizations where teams are built in the manager’s image, stepping into the shoes of another manager comes with its own set of challenges and hurdles.
Different managers have different working and communication styles. When a design team used to micromanagement suddenly gets a new manager who promotes their direct reports to learn and do for themselves, it results in a period of confusion, at best. At worst, it can lead to an utter breakdown of the team’s structure and workflows.
While it might not be possible to have the opportunity to build a new team every time, it’s worth the effort to try to give it a go.
A team built through the careful selection of its members can, with effective management, become an unstoppable machine.
If your organization cannot make room for this, the second best thing is to have an all-hands meeting with your new team and communicate to them how things will work from this point forward. This helps mitigate confusion and also provides an opportunity to unlearn undesired behaviors and re-learn better practices.
It’s important to understand that design leadership is almost as much about people management as it is about guiding design decisions. Consequently, there is always room for improvement. These are only a few ways to become a better design leader.
I’d love to know what everyone thinks a good design leader should know or do. Share your thoughts in the comments!
If you found this article useful share it with your friends. I’d love to know what everyone thinks a good design leader should know or do. Share your thoughts in the comments!
