Author: Peter Merholz

A common challenge for the design leaders I support is identifying metrics. They know their team is having a positive impact, but struggle articulating it in any concrete way. They seek canonical, industry-standard metrics that prove UX/Design’s value, but the reality is, no such metrics exist. The nature of UX/Design’s impact is specific to the company, the audience, and the problem space under question. 

I have found that, to have productive metrics discussions, it’s crucial to appreciate organizational maturity. For example, it’s hard to have a meaningful discussion of how UX/Design effects business outcomes if the company doesn’t have a model of Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) that maps customer behaviors and actions to a probability of financial return.

And when I think of maturity, I find myself returning to the four stages of competency model (shown below), which can be used as a generic maturity model in a wide array of contexts. 

Diagram illustrating the progression from Unconscious Incompetence to Conscious Incompetence to Conscious Competence to Unconscious Competence

At the initial stage of Unconscious Incompetence, the organization is deeply immature, not knowing what it doesn’t know. No one I work with is at this level, because working with me presupposes some kind of ‘conscious’ness.

The design leaders I work with seek to establish Conscious Competence, usually in the form of robust UX metrics that connect to impact, but often find themselves in Incompetent organizations that aren’t ready to make those connections.

In fact, in a Conscious Incompetent organization, UX metrics may be seen as self-interested or vain, that the UX/Design team going off doing their thing, potentially eroding trust with colleagues. 

Instead, you need to meet the organization where it’s at, which might mean ‘dumbing down’ how you gauge success. In a Design-immature organization, where you’re just trying to get a footing, the opinion your more established partners (e.g., product management, engineering) have of you may be how you show your worth.

Or, it’s likely that your organization has some rudimentary understanding of experience (e.g., anecdotes from customer care; NPS), and so you begin there, taking the language that already exists, demonstrating your concern for those areas. Over time, as you build credibility, you will then be able to introduce more mature UX/Design metrics that you know are better indicators of value.

But proving the UX/Design organization’s value, even if sophisticated, is a sign that you have not yet reached full maturity. 

The 4 Stages model shows that at the highest level of maturity, the UX/Design organization no longer needs metrics that prove its worth. It’s simply understood (“unconsciously”) throughout the company that UX/Design is worth doing. This was highlighted for me in the Finding Our Way conversation with Daniela Jorge, Chief Design Officer at PayPal, when she shared, “We don’t have hard metrics that I own from an experience standpoint, but we define those per project, right? So if we have a specific project that’s around helping customers achieve a specific goal, those are defined at the initiative level.” At PayPal, they recognize that its ultimately foolish to assign impact metrics to a function, because impact is realized through cross-functional work.

But for the Design team to get there, I’m guessing (we didn’t ask), that they did have to go through these stages of proving their worth, enabling the executive leadership team’s unconscious confidence in design’s value.

Over the holiday break, I reviewed the 5 conversations that Jesse and I have conducted with truly senior design executives for our podcast Finding Our Way, looking for lessons that could be distilled and imparted for those who aspire to such roles. As I pored over the transcripts, an overarching theme emerged:
Design leadership is change management. 

This was actually stated in the first interview, by Katrina Alcorn, GM of Design for IBM:

“Well, I think if design was fully understood and recognized and invested in and respected, the way, for example, development is, we would not need to be change agents. We would need to be good stewards… I think we’re change agents because all of us doing this are still part of a movement to change how businesses work, how they run.”

In my thought partnership work with design leaders, I’ve at times encouraged ‘change management’ tactics to help them with specific initiatives. What reviewing these discussions with successful leaders made clear is that change management isn’t a tactic—it’s the job. And that other leaders would realize greater success if they framed their efforts with this perspective.

Thankfully, these leaders also shared the mechanisms by which they’ve enacted change. Analyzing these discussions, I distilled a set of practices and a mindsets that should help anyone trying to establish design as an active participant within their organizations. While I won’t claim this as some kind of magic key to unlock success, I would encourage using it as a playbook that scaffolds your efforts.

A. Shape a vision

B. Adopt a portfolio approach

C. Manage the relationships

D. Communicate with intent

E. Maintain patience and perspective

A. Shape a vision

To lead requires vision. At minimum it’s an orientation, pointing the team in the right direction. Even better, it’s a destination to which people are being led. Visions come in many forms. They could be mindset shifts (becoming more “customer-centered” or “experience-led”), process evolution (adopting dual-track agile, user-centered and inclusive design methods), or outcomes that show impact (adopting metrics like Google’s HEART framework).

North Stars

And, being designers, a common type of vision is the North Star, a concrete depiction of an improved future-state offering. As Greg Petroff stated, “You use a north star to drive the art of the possible…, to scratch the itch on tough questions… Artifacts are … tangible and easier for people to…identify with.” For Daniela Jorge, North Stars “make it feel real so that everyone can get aligned around that same outcome and that same end state.” The thing to keep in mind (and communicate to others) is that North Stars are not execution plans, and, as Greg says, should be done “in a way where people have permission to break them and change them, and challenge them.”

B. Adopt a portfolio approach

For Design organizations, there will always be more work to do than people to do it. So the trick is to figure out how best to focus efforts. 

Kaaren Hanson cautioned against trying to do All The Things at once. “If you come in and you say, ‘We’re just going to do everything, we’re going to slow everything down,’ you are going to fail. But you can…look at this portfolio of initiatives, and say, ‘These two seem ripe for really having a bigger impact… And so we’re gonna put our points here’… and hope like hell at least one of them works.” 

Or, as Katrina Alcorn said, “If you say yes to everything, nothing gets done.”

But then, how do you assemble this portfolio?

Choosing who you work with

When Greg Petroff was building the Design capability at GE, in order to focus their limited capacity on that which would have impact, his org would only work with two kinds of teams: “either they totally got us and they totally understood design, and they were all in, or they had tried everything and were failing and the business was about to die…And if you’re in the middle, we didn’t have the time for you. We were sorry.” The logic being, “if we could take a business that was struggling and make it successful, that had currency in that culture… And then the net promoters, …they were the ones who, if things were kind of tough, they could kind of support us in a moment.”

Rachel Kobetz had a similar approach: “It was a mix of finding … those people that could be champions with me, those people that could be the beacons. It’s really important to find, not just the individuals, but the projects or programs that can be the beacons to showcase how a new way of working yields better outcomes.” 

Short-term gains within a long-term frame

Key to change management success is showing progress early. As Greg Petroff shared, “Senior executive attention span can be quite short. And so you have to find ways to show demonstrable quick wins and benefit, while leaving room for the things that are actually more substantive and impact-driven, that are going to take more time.” Rachel Kobetz cautioned that, “Sometimes, you know, leaders, they are charting the vision for tomorrow without delivering for today.” You need to balance, “be able to go deep, to be able to make sure that we’re building for today.” 

Operating Mechanisms

For that longer-term frame, output (like launching a new product or service, or overhauling something in sore need of improvement), even with successful outcomes (more sign-ups, happier users) is insufficient. As Kaaren Hanson stresses, “Those operating mechanisms count so damn much.” By operating mechanisms she means evolving processes to account for customer-centered concerns, such as making sure customer experience measurements are part of business reviews. It also means “working with leaders across the business, including the CEO of consumer bank or the CEO of connected commerce or the CEO of wealth management, to ensure that design is sitting at their table,” making it a default expectation that design is included in the senior-most business conversations. She continues, “you have to get into the operations of the company, and companies have like a, heartbeat, which goes back to, what are the expectations for designers? What are the expectations for product managers? How are we bonusing people on this stuff? Like, those are all the operating mechanisms you have to infiltrate.”

C. Manage the relationships

Infiltrating operations requires working the relationships necessary to make change happen. And while it’s important to develop good relationships with the people within your organization, what these leaders stressed was how crucial it was to establish relationships with your cross-functional peers in product, engineering, marketing, and with executives and other stakeholders.

Cross-functional relationships

Kaaren Hanson has staffed her leadership team such that “every design leader that sits within a line of business sits at that [line of business’] CEO table.” She also expects that her design leaders are spending more time messaging and in meetings with their “product, engingeering, and data partners” than any other people. 

And Rachel Kobetz, with whom we went quite deep on relationships, shared, “when I’m talking about the importance of the relationships, it’s where I spend a lot of my time. …Working across and working up…the whole company to make sure that there’s clear communication, there’s trust and we’re building relationships so that people understand what we’re doing.”

Make your partners successful

A recurring theme was to focus not on your own organization’s success, but, as Kaaren Hanson points out, “my job is to make you [my partner] more successful.” Greg Petroff echoed this, “you always wanna make sure that the, your partner is the one who gets the attention…We celebrated the wins, but the win was not us. The win was the business unit.”

Co-create outcomes before starting the work

A means for strengthening relationships, and to ensure your partners’ success is to co-create outcomes before doing the work. As Greg Petroff put it, “I’m all about co-defining outcomes. I think that’s a missing gap in software development. And I think a lot of product teams start without actually having a lot of clarity about what they’re trying to accomplish and they feel like the agile process will help them get there and it’s just nuts. And so you know, I am, I’m all about working with product teams early on to do things like Lean UX canvas work.”

Designers often like to talk process, but Rachel Kobetz suggests, “don’t harp on the process itself. Actually focus on the outcomes, and when you have shared outcomes together, you’re going to be set up for success.” By starting with shared outcomes, you can then engage in process discussions, because if “you’re aligned on shared outcomes, they’re going to be much more receptive and open to a new way of working, versus you just come in and say, ‘Everything you’re doing is wrong, and this is how we’re gonna do it.'”

Mixed maturity means varying reactions

One of the specific challenges of managing change, particularly in sizable organizations, is that you’ll have a different degrees of maturity in the different parts of the organization, and that leads to a range of reactions to that change. As Greg Petroff said, “it depends on the culture of the organization and it’s maturity and sometimes parts of the organization are great and others aren’t.”

Rachel Kobetz shared, “People handle change or evolution much differently. You have some people that are, like, ‘This feels awesome. I love it.’ You have other people…that say ‘change is the only thing that’s constant.’ And then you have other people that are like, ‘Wait, hold on, you moved my cheese, what happened here?'”

No judgment, maintain positivity, avoid toxicity

At the heart of change management is a recognition that things today aren’t as good as they could or should be (or why bother changing). TSo his leads to an unfortunate tendency to criticize the current state, but, as Kaaren Hanson learned, “Being judgmental is toxic…As someone who’s been in this field, we are incredibly critical of things. That’s our job is to be critical, right? But that’s not helpful when you’re working with other people, and you’re trying to drive change in an organization, because if you’re judgemental, it’s almost like you’re adding toxicity to relationship. So I’ve had to rein that way back.”

D. Communicate with intent

Every leader we spoke with addressed the importance of communications, and having a strategy, a plan. It’s not enough to do the work, it’s even not enough to make an impact. If you don’t make the effort to let others know about that impact, it might as well not have happened.

Katrina Alcorn shared how she’d been publicly blogging about the ongoing evolution of design at IBM. 

Kaaren Hanson stressed how much time she’s spent with her leaders, having them share their stories with her initially, so she can provide feedback on the most salient points to then communicate out, “they’ll have those short stories and snippets that they can share with their executives in the elevator.”

Greg Petroff has built “shadow comms teams,” writing a monthly newsletter about all the things his team was doing. Tying to the prior theme, these newsletters showcased partners, “always a story about someone else in the organization that we promoted, ‘the SVP of product does this, and here’s the decisions that they made that were great around design work,’ because you want to celebrate them, too.”

Rachel Kobetz has found that the “the essence of it is just overcommunication.” She exploits a number of channels in getting her message out, “whether that is in a conversation with another executive in a meeting, and being able to have that moment to talk about the great work that the team is doing, or that our two teams are doing together. Creating a newsletter. Doing my own writing and pushing it out across the company. Whether it’s in town halls or, showcases, quarterly events, all of the different avenues you can take, you have to use those as opportunities to get the word out.” She concludes,  you’re never done with that communication.”

Transparency

A judgment call that’s difficult for some leaders is knowing what to say to whom. As leaders, you have access to potentially sensitive information. That said, Kaaren Hanson stresses the importance of transparency: “if you’re not transparent about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, it’s easy for people to read all kinds of other things into what you’re doing.” Daniela Jorge concurs, “something that I always aim to do as a leader, is providing as much transparency and context… I think it’s very easy when you’re in a leadership position to forget that you have access to a lot more information and context that a designer on the team might not.”

This transparency is essential for working with other functions, particularly when working toward shared outcomes. Rachel Kobetz proposes, “you instead open up that box and you create transparency in the process. You bring people in, you make them part of that process from day one, but then when you’re telling the story of it, you’re starting off on the foot of, we’re all aligned to shared outcomes.”

E. Maintain patience and perspective

As design leaders, we often have a clear view of where we want to go, and what it will take to get there, and the time it takes to make progress can prove quite frustrating. When I asked Daniela Jorge about how she helps her leaders who may be operating at a new level of seniority, she shared, “a lot of it is that we talk about perspective, patience, right? Figuring out how you’re influencing, figuring out how you can sometimes measure progress in small increments. Because the job that we do is hard, right? And especially because I think we are able to see what it should be and what it could be. And that isn’t always what is happening in that moment or in the short term. So, a lot of the time that we spend is just talking, regaining perspective so that folks don’t get discouraged.” 

So get out there, and make some change!

If I were to assess the ‘vibes’ at the outset of 2023, it’s that there is a potential for fundamental shifts in the ways that businesses are working. This provides an opportunity for Design Leaders to proactively insert themselves into those ‘operating mechanisms’ (as Kaaren Hanson put it), and make some real change. 

As this post suggests, change is hard. Its taxing, frustrating, and time consuming. But it’s also how we can make things better, for us, our teams, our colleagues, and our customers. If you’re signing up to be a design leader, you are signing up to make change.

(And if you’re interested in pursuing this theme further, I wholeheartedly recommend the new book Changemakers by Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland. It provides clear actions you can take to realize the change you seek.)

Though the book I co-wrote is titled Org Design for Design Orgs, and, sure, it addresses broader design concerns (communication design, service design, hardware and industrial design, environmental design), it’s focused on a kind of design org, specifically digital product/UX design orgs reflecting the bulk of the experience Kristin and I have. 

As such, I’ve been surprised, and humbled, when I meet Brand Design leaders who have read the book and found it helpful in thinking about how they shape their teams. What I’ve found is that, as these teams grow, their leaders not only struggle with many of the same challenges product/UX design leaders face, their distinct organizational context leads to a whole bunch of different problems.

Yesterday, I had the honor of facilitating a public conversation titled “Org Design for Brand Design Orgs,” featuring Li-Anne Dias (Director of Brand Design at Handshake), Erin Pinkley (VP, Creative at Zendesk), and Jessica Rosenberg (Director of Brand Design at Webflow). The idea for the event came about when Li-Anne reached out to me with a lot of thoughts on applying the lessons from the book to her work, and so I connected her with Erin and Jess, both of whom I’d had the fortune of supporting in the past. Li-Anne prepared a presentation to kick things off, and I facilitated the conversation between the three of them, as well as bringing in questions from the audience. This all took place over Zoom, so we recorded it, and I have shared it on my just-launched YouTube channel:

Over these 75 minutes, we cover a lot of ground, but what we also realized is that this is a conversation that is just beginning. Each of us would love to continue the discussion, so if you’ve got ideas on where to do so, let us know!

(this post is a bit of a muddle, but addresses what I see as a crisis in our field, and so I wanted to get these ideas out there, warts and all.)

A manager has many responsibilities, but the job boils down to “getting the most out of their team.” This means working with the team to get desired outcomes (high quality, customer and business impact, positive internal relationships), and to help team members grow in their careers.

Recently, I’ve been part of conversations that illuminate a crisis in management which in turn is failing UX professionals. When Abby Covert joined Jesse and I on our podcast, she compared the companies we work with to the Ship of Theseus, where all the individual pieces change, though the ship stays the same, and how we need a “fairy godmother who is going to shepherd us through the organization,” because “management in this industry changes over very quickly.” This was reinforced in a totally separate discussion I had with a Sr Designer, who’d been in the same company for 3 or 4 years, and had 6 or 7 managers over that span. 

For my own curiosity I launched a poll on LinkedIn asking people how many different managers they’d had in the last 3 years. The results:

Poll results to the question, "In the last 3 years, how many different managers have you had?" 46% responded 1-2, 42% responded 3-4, 10% responded 5-6, and 3% responded 7 or more.

With a little arithmetic, you see that more than half of the respondents have a new manager at least every year, with a decent portion having 2 new managers every year.

The Management Carousel is detrimental to team member growth

A team member works with a manager on a growth plan, that manager starts them on this path, but then the team member shifts to a new manager, and that new manager is likely trying to get up-to-speed on a whole bunch of matters, so career growth stalls, and if managers keep turning over, the team member cannot advance. 

Such stalling isn’t just a problem for the team member, though. It damages the broader organization in two ways. The most obvious is, if team members aren’t growing, they’re not getting better at their job, so the work doesn’t improve.

But more crucially, when team members don’t see a growth path, they leave. A few years ago, Todd Zaki Warfel conducted research and analysis on careers in design, and found that the second most common reason for people to leave a company was “lack of career path.” 

The “lack of career path” is particularly acute in UX/Design

The Management Carousel is neither new, nor specific to UX and Design. That said, I think it’s more of a problem in these fields, because there are not broad industry standards for what it means to grow as a professional. Particularly for the early-career professional looking ahead, their potential growth paths appear to be covered in ivy and vines, and the best that most companies do is give them a machete and say, “Good luck.”

How to help people grow

The Fairy Godm—, err, Career Counselor

Abby’s comment about a “fairy godmother” may sound glib, but I think it points to a real solution. UX/Design orgs should have someone in the role of Career Counselor. This is not a manager, but someone who works across the whole organization to advocate for employees’ development, and work with team members to chart their paths. In smaller orgs, this would be a role that someone plays (probably someone in Design Operations who has more of a ‘people’ bent than a ‘programs’ bent), and then as a team scaled, it could become a dedicated position. 

Empower Employees with Robust Career Architectures

When we accept the Management Carousel as a given, it becomes clear that career development must be placed in the hands of the only constant: the employees. They require content and tools to figure out how they can grow. This doesn’t mean that managers aren’t involved, it just means that the process begins and ends with the team member.

As such, companies need to build robust and understandable career architectures that illuminate paths forward. Many teams have built career ladders or some other leveling framework, but that is only just the beginning. In work I’ve been doing over this past year, I’ve crafted more robust architectures built upon three components:

Capabilities

At the heart of professional development are the Capabilities needed to do the work:
– Craft skills
– Strategic mindset and tools
– Professional capabilities

Leveling

An org-wide Leveling Framework structures a set of expectations for experience, autonomy, and scope at each career level, and across Manager and IC tracks.

Disciplines

Within any function is a set of Disciplines that part of the organization is responsible for. For UX, that’s typically UX Design, UX Research, and Content Design.

Specific Roles are found at the intersection of Levels and Disciplines, with suitability and readiness made clear by competency in skills. 

(At some point, I’ll be publishing more of my work on such architectures. Until then, if you’re interested in learning more, I’m leading a workshop on the subject from 12-15 September 2022 for the Design Ops Summit.)

There’s a lot more to unpack from here

I’ve only scratched the surface of what I think is a crisis in management for the Design / UX field. True lasting solutions will need broad community and industry support, including real professionalization (certification, licensing, etc.) brought forth by credible professional organizations (like the Interaction Design Association or the User Experience Professionals Association) that establish an outline of what it means to advance in your career. 

Design as an executive function is new, so Heads of Design are typically lonelier than their peer leadership positions. Your boss may have never had a truly senior Design leader report to them, and doesn’t really understand all that a Design team can deliver. You’re only Design leader on executive team, whereas there are multiple Product Management and Engineering leads.

This means that there’s no one to turn to internally as you try to figure out how to best lead your Design organization.

This is where I come in. I support executive Heads of Design in a mode I call “Thought Partnership.” I work with design leaders to accelerate thinking through their trickiest challenges, leveraging my experience (20+ years leading design teams; 5 years as a management consultant across all kinds of design organizations) to identify paths forward, enabling Heads of Design to make important, impactful decisions with confidence. Recent work with design leaders addressed such matters as:

  • Scaling from 30 to 100 team members
  • What their job actually is, where they should focus (and what they need to delegate)
  • Building career architectures and leveling frameworks
  • Improving recruiting and hiring practices
  • Establishing Design Operations
  • Elevating Design’s impact in the company
  • Evolving product development practices to better incorporate design throughout the process
  • Articulate a strategic vision to align product efforts

I’ve done this work ad hoc, in response to design leaders reaching out to see if I could support them. It has been some of my favorite work, capitalizing on my distinct vantage point to help leaders go from uncertain to confident, and see real impact in short time frames. 

As such, I’m now setting aside more time for this kind of work, and, well, telling the world that this is a service I’m happy to offer. 

It’s a small investment of time: the work is typically structured as one or two 1-hour sessions a month. In each session the Design Leader shares with me their topmost challenge, and we work together to figure out the best way forward. 

If this is something you’d like to take part in, please reach out through email, and we can then set up follow-up discussions.

On a recent episode of Finding Our Way, Jesse and I spoke with Tim Kieschnick. I worked with Tim for about a year, and learned a ton from our collaboration. He’s an interesting cat—he worked at Kaiser Permanente for 30 years (until retirement), and in that time helped establish their web presence, UX as a practice, service design, and HCD/Design Thinking/Design Sprints. He’s a reflective practitioner, and through his experience developed two frameworks which I have in turn used in my thought partnership practice with design leaders. I was eager for him to share his wisdom on our podcast.

The 3Ps of the Leadership Ceiling

A little over a year ago, at my urging (so I could refer to it without feeling like I was plagiarizing), Tim posted an introduction to The Leadership Ceiling. (some of what I write here will repeat what’s over there, but in my words.) At heart, it’s a simple construct: Leaders create a conceptual ceiling above which their organization cannot rise. Tim identifies three ceilings:

Purpose

Why does this organization exist? How is that purpose articulated? Are we driving toward output, or outcomes? How does our purpose inspire, connecting people with their higher, better selves?

People

Who is in this organization? What is the caliber of contributor? And, are we creating a truly people-centered organization that enables those folks to deliver at their best? 

Process

How is the work getting done? Does our process bog us down, or lift us up? How are we coordinating across functions? Are people spread too thin, across too many initiatives, or are they able to maintain focus and commitment? Are teams empowered to practice a process that is ‘fit for purpose,’ or is there an imposed standard way of doing things that cannot be deviated from?

(This is reminiscent of what Daniel Pink identified in Drive, in terms of what it takes to motivate people: provide them Autonomy (process), Mastery (people), and Purpose.)

In my experience, I don’t see three ceilings, rather one ceiling that is a product of how these three factors intersect. In my work with design leaders, looking at the intersection has proven helpful, because it illuminates why there’s cognitive dissonance between the message they’re getting from their leadership, and why the work doesn’t meet their expectations. 

The diagram to the right shows my take on this aspect, which is that the Leadership Ceiling is set by which ever factor is lowest. 

For instance, I’ve supported a number of banks and insurance services firms. And nearly all of them have high-minded aspirations for their business, with mission statements about empowering people’s financial wellbeing, or improving the health of all Americans. And these firms will also have committed to providing a much more conscientious work environment that encourages bringing your whole self, and stresses values of psychological safety and vulnerability.

But these large legacy organizations are bogged down in process, for reasons including bureaucracy, poor organization design, unwillingness to truly empower teams, people spread too thin across too many workstreams, etc. 

And so, the Leadership Ceiling is established by that lowest factor. And the design leaders I work with, who may have been sold on a company’s vision and culture, then struggle when they realize that for all that high-and-mighty talk, their ability to deliver is severely hamstrung by a lack of attention to process. 

The ABC’s of The Leadership Ceiling

Once you understand the height of a Leadership Ceiling, then you have to figure out your relationship to it. Tim uses an ABC mnemonic to think through what you can do:

 

Diagram of the ABC of The Leadership Ceiling from Tim’s website.

You can try to work Above the ceiling

This approach is pretty common for designers, particularly new to an organization, who see their job as to ‘fix’ whatever came before, or to realize a bold new innovative vision. And they may see their leader’s Ceiling, and perhaps engaged in some effort where they bumped their head on the ceiling, and then see their job as the innovative iconoclast to work above the ceiling, to show to the rest of the org just how great it can be. 

This never works. You might get some time to play in that rarefied air, but inevitably the leader’s Ceiling does its thing, often in the form of the Leader being frustrated that the designer isn’t doing what was expected of them, instead pursuing some quixotic endeavor that was bound to go nowhere.

So, most of us end up working Below the ceiling

We realize that we are constrained by the leader’s ceiling, and focus our efforts there. The dream is to have a leader with a high ceiling across all 3Ps, providing all kinds of headroom to innovate and grow. But most of us find ourselves below a ceiling lower than our liking, and so we have to make a choice:

We can Bail. We may believe that we’ll never reach our potential, or that work will be endlessly frustrating, and given our limited time on this planet, we want to focus our energies elsewhere. (This has been what I do. This model has helped me realize that I have little tolerance for working under a low, or even medium-height, ceiling.)

We can Bide our time. We make the best of the situation in front of us, delivering excellence within the leader’s constraints. Biding may sound defeatist, but it shouldn’t be perceived as settling. It can be a smart and pragmatic strategy of getting things ready for when the time comes and either our leader raises the ceiling, or is replaced by someone with a higher ceiling. In the podcast, we talked to Tim about telehealth, which Kaiser Permanente had been pursuing for 25 years. And if you were passionate about telehealth, you were likely frustrated, because it never caught on the way you felt it should—the organization wouldn’t invest in it and the membership didn’t seem to appreciate the convenience. 
And then 2020 happens, the world goes on lockdown, and that causes the Ceiling to be raised on telehealth. And all those folks who had been biding their time, waiting for the moment, are now center-stage.

Some bold souls may seek to Change the ceiling

As Tim puts it, this “is not for the faint of heart.” But if you are frustrated by the height of the ceiling, and you’re not content working Below it, and you’re committed to the organizational cause and so you won’t just Bail, you can try to change the ceiling. This requires diagnosing just what is depressing the ceiling, developing an argument and a plan for raising the ceiling, and then doing the hard work of education and evangelism to persuade leaders to change the ceiling. This is particularly tricky, because those leaders, over their career, have received a lot of confirming feedback about the rightness of their decisions, and now someone within their org is going to tell them that they’ve got it wrong? So, it requires delicate, incisive, and persistent communication to figure out what stories resonate with the leader and encourage them to evolve their view. 

I’m so grateful Tim spoke with us, and driving broader awareness of this framework. I’ve found it quite useful in my work helping design leaders succeed, and I’d love to hear (or read) how it works for you. 

“Agile” product practices, whether, Scrum, SAFe, squads, etc., encourage the formation of independent, self-sustaining teams. As the importance of design has become more broadly understood, these ‘user-facing’ product teams often feature an embedded designer, working with a product manager (or product owner), and some number of engineers, as depicted in this diagram:

Diagram depicting product teams, with one designer, one PM, and n number of engineers per team

When you embed this designer, you’re now asking that individual to deliver across a daunting range of capabilities:

Diagram showing the designer in the center, and their responsibility for visual design, interaction desing, copywriting, user research, strategic thinking, information architecture, communication skills, leadership, and planning

The plight of the Junior/Entry-level Designer

Any junior designer thrown into this situation struggles, as they don’t have the experience and expertise to handle this. Often, the Product Manager is a mid-career contributor, who doesn’t know how to coach up designers. So, the junior designer ends up acting as a production artist, serving at the behest of the Product Manager. I hear a lot about Design organizations that are seen primarily as production shops, and it’s almost always for this reason—the designers aren’t true peers to product and engineering, and are just expected to do what they’re told.

Given this, a common refrain I hear from design leaders is that they cannot hire junior designers, because they need to bring people on who can slot into this context and hold their own. This is exacerbated by the design leaders often being spread too thin, so they don’t have any capacity for mentorship.

So, junior designers are caught between a rock and a hard place:

  • they’re hired into an untenable situation, and struggle to do anything more than be a production artist (and wonder why they bothered getting that fancy design degree if they can only practice 20% of what they learned)
  • they keep hearing about how “there are not enough designers,” but they can’t get anyone to even talk to them about a job

Everyone suffers when we don’t make space for junior designers

This ends up creating additional stresses within design teams and the broader design industry. Within design teams, there’s a constant struggle to find senior talent, as these teams have no internal pipeline in which to mature designers, and senior designers are highly sought after in the recruiting market. Also, because there aren’t junior designers in the design team, the senior designers end up doing a lot of production-level work, which takes time away from more impactful, bigger-picture work, and which limits the strategic contribution that the design team is able to make within the organization. So then these senior designers get frustrated and burned out, and leave in order to find opportunities that are more fulfilling.

Within the broader design industry, there’s a recognition of a severe lack of talent to meet demand, but we end up getting in our own way as we continue to forsake training up junior designers. 

A way forward: organize design around teams, not individuals

This challenge with junior designers is one of many reasons why I advocate thinking of building design orgs at the level of team, not the individual. 

Diagram showing how designers can work in a team, across a set of product teams

In this model, instead of embedding designers within product teams, designers are pulled out into their own team, working across set of product teams addressing some contiguous aspect of the user experience. Instead of needing each designer to be an identical unicorn, a team of designers can have a range of experience and a variety of skill sets. The “S” designers are Senior designers who maintain the relationship with Product Managers across two product teams. They engage that Product Manager as a true peer, not as someone who just tells them what to do. The “D” designers are junior and mid-level designers who can float to where they are needed. They don’t work on their own, but always with the guidance of a senior designer or the Team Lead (TL). This is how they develop their practice. (Unrelated, but worth calling out: Since we’re operating as a team, team members can have distinct skill depths. So, here, we have a Content Designer (“CD”) who can bring expertise in writing and information architecture to the work being done.)

Through a model such as this, we have made room to bring in junior designers, situate them in a way that they can learn and grow, enable more Senior designers to focus on higher order challenges, and have created an internal pipeline to develop team members so they become our next generation of senior designers as we need them. 

“Agile” orthodoxy is harmful to the practice of design

To simply follow standard practices for “Agile” development (I’m putting “Agile” in quotes because I recognize that these practices often conflict with the original intent of the Agile movement), is to sell short the future of design as a function and a practice. We need design leaders to advocate for organizational structures and processes that enable design to deliver on its potential, or we will continue to see designers treated as subservient to other functions, order takers with little agency in their work.

Every design manager knows there’s an intense war for talent.  It’s been going on for the past 15 years, and has definitely ratcheted up in the past 12-18 months. 

Last year, I supported one team that grew from 14 in March to over 40 by the end of the year. This wasn’t some sexy tech company—it was enterprise SaaS supporting HR. I point this out because, even in with all the competition, it’s quite possible to scale an organization. The issue, which I’ve seen over and over again for years, is that most design orgs are just bad at recruiting and hiring, getting in their own ways. Here are the top mistakes that I’ve seen. 

Hiring Managers don’t devote the necessary time

Hiring Managers are busy people. Their attention is pulled in many directions. They are expected to lead their team, provide creative vision, manage the individuals, partner with cross-functional peers, roll up their sleeves and do the work, oh, yeah, and build their team. That last item gets deferred, as it doesn’t have the urgency of their other responsibilities. As such, many Hiring Managers find themselves in this cycle:

Depicts the vicious hiring cycle

Perhaps the single most impactful thing a Hiring Manager can do is protect their time for recruiting and hiring. When active, expect to spend about 4 hours per week per open headcount—this accounts for time spent sourcing, reaching out to prospective candidates, initial conversations to gauge interest, deeper conversations once someone applies, and the background stuff around planning and preparing others to support the hiring process. 

Over-reliance on Recruiters

When I counsel design executives and their leadership teams about recruiting and hiring practices, I often get a variant of the reply, “Isn’t that the Recruiter’s job?” The short answer is: No. 

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t develop a strong partnership with your Recruiting team. But, I’ve seen, again and again, that when Design Leaders rely on a separate Recruiting team, particularly for sourcing potential candidates, their efforts come up short. 

The Design Org needs to own their recruiting and hiring practices and processes. The Recruiting partners are their to support you, not do your job for you. 

Under-reliance on the rest of the Design org

While Hiring Managers need to be the engine that drives recruiting and hiring, this doesn’t mean they operate as lone wolves, expected to do everything on their own. Hiring Managers must rely on support from others in the Design organization, specifically:

  • Their manager — to help them protect their time, and manage the relationships with peers who may be upset that the Hiring Manager is focused on recruiting, and not “the work.”
  • Their team — Hiring Managers should engage their team members in sourcing, gauging interest, and interviewing. Not only is this an example of “many hands make light work” (ok, lighter work), I have found that passive candidates (i.e., those not actively looking to change jobs) are often more receptive to outreach from another designer, in a way that they are not from a Design Manager, and definitely not from a Recruiter.
  • Design Operations — Any scaling organization should have a “PeopleOps” person specific for Design, and among their responsibilities is maintaining a set of robust tools to support the recruiting process: job descriptions, career and levels frameworks, question banks, and assessment rubrics. 

Insufficient articulation of the role(s) to be hired

Hiring Managers know they need people, and often take an existing job description, lightly revise it, and post it. They rarely do the diligence to figure out what they actually need in the role. This hinders the recruiting process, as it becomes apparent, through conversations with candidates and colleagues, that there is not a shared understanding of the profile we seek to hire. 

This is a classic example of “measure twice, cut once.” A little more work upfront will lead to far less time spent down the line. 

One tool I’ve begun to see great promise in is the Thank You Note, as posited by Jared Spool. This is an “artifact from the future,” where the Hiring Manager drafts a memo thanking the person for what they’ve accomplished in their first year. Putting yourself in that ‘year ahead’ mindset, while forcing yourself to be specific, results in essentially drafting the job description. 

Cavalier recruiting processes that ignore known best practices

This frustrates me more than any other aspect, because solid practices for recruiting are not mysteries, but teams neglect them. Hiring Managers resort to what they’ve done in the past, and everyone wonders why it’s so hard to find good people. 

Processes that are too lengthy or too brief

For a client I supported in 2016, I recommended shortening the interview day (which takes place after initial phone screens) to “5 hours, 6 hours most.” When I recently re-read that, had I been sipping a beverage, I would have done a spit-take. Because while that amount of time is too long, I’m now seeing teams that spend 2 hours with a candidate, total, before making a hiring decision, driven by the need to ‘act fast’ in this competitive market.

In my experience, there’s a “Goldilocks” scenario that works for most design/research/content hires:

  • Two 30-45 minute phone screens, one conducted by the hiring manager to get a sense of the candidate as a professional, another by a team member digging in to the specifics of their craft
  • Panel Presentation + four 1:1s, taking about 2.5-3.5 hours

You need to spend enough time to feel confident in the ‘signal’ you’re getting. But too much time leads to diminishing returns. 

Adversarial stances with candidates

Many hiring managers (and their broader recruiting context) approach engaging candidates in an adversarial way, where the candidate has to ‘prove themselves’ worthy of consideration. Fuck that masculine posturing bullshit. Your company isn’t so great that it can act as if they’re deigning to speak with someone.

I’ve also heard Hiring Managers say that they don’t want to provide too much information (see the next item), because they felt part of the process was the candidate to figure out what’s expected. Recruiting processes shouldn’t be the conversational equivalent of an escape room, where the candidate solves the puzzle of ‘how do I get hired?”

And, for my sake, just stop with the design exercises.  No, really.

No preparation for candidates or interview panelists

Perhaps because of the time constraints mentioned at the outset, I often find Hiring Managers (and Recruiters) do almost nothing to prepare either the candidates or the interview panelists about the process and what’s expected of them. 

With candidates, sometimes it’s a matter of the prior point on adversarial stances, but often it’s just thoughtlessness. Apart from blocking time on their calendar, candidates often have no idea what to expect from conversation to conversation. 

With panelists, often, they learn about an interview when a slot is dropped on their calendar, with no context, not even a resume or LinkedIn profile. 

Candidates should be provided extensive preparation for the process. How long it will take; what the steps are; how to shape their portfolio presentation; whom they will be meeting and what topics will be addressed. We want to best know the candidate, and that means enabling them to present their best self.

Panelists should be coordinated such that each has a topic area that they dig into, and a set of questions to draw from. This avoids needless duplication across 1:1 interviews, and ensures a broader understanding of the candidate. 

Gut-level judgment of candidates

Throughout the process, the assessments of candidates are typically superficial and gut-driven. Hiring Managers and panelists may take notes, but often there’s no standard by which to make a judgment, and so hiring decisions are based solely on feeling, rather than a considered judgment, placed against a robust profile of the role.

This gets back to the issue shared earlier, where Hiring Managers insufficiently articulate the profile of a desired candidate, so people don’t have a clear frame of reference for their judgment. This can lead to a couple of different problematic outcomes:

  • the endless searching for some kind of unicorn who satisfies everyone
  • offers extended to a candidate that everyone likes, but is actually not suited to the role: for example, hiring someone as a Lead Designer because everyone thinks highly of their design skills, but not enough was done to assess their leadership characteristics

A lack of up-front clarity also contributes to implicit bias, favoring candidates who ‘look the part,’ whether or not they’re best suited. 

Assessment rubrics for each stage of the process should be clearly defined ahead of time. I’ve published a tool I’ve used to support portfolio reviews. You’ll need to come up with your own for other stages. 

With solid assessment rubrics, hiring decisions become much clearer and with reduced bias. You know when someone is qualified, and you’re confident in making an offer. 

And there’s more…

What’s shared here are the top mistakes that, in my view, contribute the most to poor recruiting outcomes. But by no means are they the only issues that commonly arise. Others include:

  • Poorly written job descriptions, typically too vague, boilerplate, and littered with non-inclusive language that discourages qualified applicants
  • Unclear or undefined levels framework, so judgments about job requirements, and then candidate aptitude, are made without any frame of reference
  • Sourcing practices that don’t go beyond posting a job to a LinkedIn profile and hoping for the best
  • Waiting too long to address the compensation conversation, only to find out in the offer stage that your salary band doesn’t meet candidate expectations
  • Lack of appreciation for reference checks, the only tool in this process that  engages people who have actually worked with the candidate

If this sounds like a lot, that’s because it is

Generally,  design orgs simply have not treated recruiting and hiring with the focus, attention, planning, and effort that it deserves. It is somehow just expected to get done. 

I find the story I told at the beginning, of a team going from 14 to 40 in a year, to be illustrative of a path forward. I was supporting that team, and probably spending ~10-15 hours a week on various activities that support recruiting (career ladders, job descriptions, working with recruiters, sourcing, interviews, etc.) By having a senior person in a People Ops-like role, who wasn’t weighed down with explicit management responsibility, who could develop materials to support recruiting practices, and also drive the effort in hiring key leadership roles, this team was able to scale quickly and with quality. Most teams aren’t willing to make such an up-front investment, instead hopeful that they can get by with what they have. What I’ve seen, though, is that orgs that make that investment, realize a worthwhile return. 

From a VP of Design I work with:

“I had to have an intense conversation with someone on my team, who is struggling with the shift from Design Manager to Design Director. The Product Lead this Director works with has started reaching out to me again. When I dug into it with her, I found that she’s still doing the thing that Product Managers love, getting into the nitty-gritty details. But the Product Lead is still waiting for a vision statement, a hypothesis around where the experience could be going. She went too deep too fast, and hadn’t gotten alignment on strategic direction.”

When working with executive design leaders across organizations, I often hear something along these lines. Their Managers and Directors don’t know how to best spend their time, and where to focus their attention. Interestingly, I hear something similar from C-level people about design executives—they’re too focused on their team, and not the organization as a whole.

What many design leaders don’t understand is just how much their role changes, in particular, the relationships they need to have, as they advance in their career. 

Design Manager

A Design Manager is someone relatively new to formal leadership, and has people reporting into them, anywhere from 3 to 8 (any more than that, and the Manager will be overwhelmed). 

Diagram of how a manager spends their timeTheir primary orientation is downward. They’re focused on getting the most out of the team the manage, making sure they’re delivering on expectations in terms of addressing problems and upholding quality.

Their secondary orientation is sideways, working both with Design Manager peers to drive coherence across teams, and working with cross-functional peers (Product Management, Engineering), to coordinate and plan delivery efforts.

Design Director

When we promote a Design Manager to become Design Director, we often don’t communicate how this is a fundamentally different job than the one they had before. As the quote that started this post shows, many new Directors resort to the practices that helped them succeed as a Manager, but those will get in the way of their performance as a Director. 

Diagram of how a Design Director spends their timeA Design Director’s primary orientation is sideways, and not only that it’s mostly outside of Design. An effective Design Director should be spending more of their time and energy working with non-design peers and other stakeholders than with any other kind of colleague.

Their secondary orientation is downward, with a focus on managing their Managers. Their job isn’t to get into the nitty-gritty themselves, but to provide guidance and mentorship for their reports. Directors are also crucial for establishing the management culture and philosophy for their teams. But they shouldn’t need to spend anywhere near the time they used to in managing down, because, well, they have managers to handle that. 

Lastly, a Director will spend a small portion of their time managing up, to their VP and non-design leadership, keeping them apprised of what’s happening in their world, and learning overarching strategy and vision in order to make sure their organization is aligned with global goals. 

Design Executive (S/VP of Design)

When talking to CEOs, their primary concern about Design Executives is that they see themselves as a Design Leader first and an Organizational Leader second. CEOs expect Design Executives to see their cross-functional peers as their “first team.” with the design organization as their second.

How a VP spends their timeAnd in terms of time spent, it goes even farther than that. The Design Team should be where a Design Executive spends the least amount of time. Their primary orientation is sideways, toward their executive peers. This is about planning and strategy for the organization, identifying opportunities for the business and how their coordinated teams can realize them.

Their secondary orientation is up and out. It may seem counterintuitive that an executive would spend so much time engaging with a small number of even more senior executives, but that’s the reality. That’s your key audience. They’re the ones who are needed to support the plans of the Design Executive and their peers, to commit the resources necessary. “Out” may mean executive leaders outside your direct reporting chain, and in some environments it may mean key customers or partners. As a Design Executive, you now represent the company in a variety of contexts, both internally and externally.

A high-performing Design Executive should spend their least amount of time focused on matters within their Design Organization. It may take a while to get to this point—it requires a strong Design Leadership team, and effective operational practices around recruiting and hiring, staffing, performance management, quality standards, etc. But, really, a Design Executive shouldn’t need to spend much time orienting downward, because they should be able to rely on their org to get stuff done. 

 

 

This post builds on the Emerging Shape of Design Orgs.

As design organizations scale, I’ve worked with a number of design leaders who struggle with all that’s expected of them. Let’s look at the “HR Software” org I drew in the last post. 

No Time for Creative Leadership

The VP Design is a true design executive, and, as I wrote in The Makeup of a Design Executive, is expected to deliver on Executive, Creative, Managerial, and Operational leadership. The thing is, with a team this size, and particularly if it’s growing (as so many teams are), they simply don’t have the time to do it all (unless they work 60-, 70-, 80-hour weeks). And these VPs need to focus on what’s core to their role, which are the executive and managerial aspects, and so the creative leadership suffers.

Even the Design Director is spread thin—overseeing a team of 15-20 people, recruiting and hiring, encouraging professional development, building relationships with cross-functional peers. This takes up all your time, and, apart from weekly critique sessions, they don’t have capacity to provide creative and strategic leadership to their teams. 

Which Means No Time for Strategy

Design organizations are increasingly expected to contribute to product strategy, but these structures support little more than product delivery. If the team is asked to develop a vision for the future product experience 2-3 years out, how do they get it done? 

One way is to hire external consultancies. And that can serve as a good kickstart, but such relationships should be seen as bridges toward when the design org is able to conduct its own strategic practice. 

And as design orgs scale, and design leaders develop organizational authority, a common move is to create a Design Strategy group, a small team of senior designers to tackle wicked problems outside of the constraints of business as usual. It may look something like this (building on the depiction of the growing design org from the last post):

Scaled design organization with Strategy team tacked at the end(There’s an argument to be made that the Strategy Team could be a pillar of the Platform team. The point that follows wouldn’t really change.)

Separate Strategy Teams within Design Orgs suffer the same problem that any separated team has—getting traction. Now, looking at the diagram above, you could say the same about the Platform team, but in that case, the Applications teams all understand why integrating with Platform makes sense—the Application teams can focus on the higher order work specific to their business area, and move faster. 

Now take the perspective of an Application team. That Strategy Team gets to do fun vision stuff, play in a space with little accountability, and then what… tell us what to do? And if we try to work with the Strategy Team, we’re told that they’re looking at broader, end-to-end experiences, and don’t want to be confined to any particular business area.

And so the Strategy Team gets frustrated because while folks may get excited about their ideas, it’s not clear how they get purchase within product development.

Two Birds (Creative Leadership and Strategy) and One Stone: The Shadow Strategy Team 

So, scaling design orgs have a problem. The acknowledged leaders (executives and directors) don’t have the bandwidth to provide the strategic and creative leadership expected of them, and necessary for the optimal effectiveness of the team. Building a separate Strategy team addresses some of this, but is typically too removed from the actual work to make an impact.

A solution lurks within the Emerging Shape of Design Orgs, with the addition of Super Senior ICs . Design organizations are increasingly hiring Principal Designers and Design Architects, as shown in this diagram (click/tap to enlarge).

Scaled org with Super Senior ICs added

Design Architect. Reporting to the VP of Design, they have no managerial or operational responsibilities, and so are able to focus on creative and strategic leadership. I’ve written this job description a few times over the past couple years, and here is what the “Responsibilities include…” section looks like:

  • Provide creative and strategic leadership for design and throughout product development
  • Advocate for user-centered design best practices within product development
  • Partner with product and engineering leaders across the company
  • Spearhead the development of experience-led product vision across the entire product suite
  • Provide guidance and direction for key ‘horizontal’ activities such as Design System development
  • Create strategic design deliverables such as strategy decks, customer journeys, visions of future experiences and evangelize these cross-product “blueprints” across teams
  • Build and maintain a framework for establishing and assessing design quality
  • Connect design with business value
  • Work with design, research, program management, and product leaders on process for product development

Principal Designer. This role is similar to the Design Architect, just within a specific business area, reporting to a Design Director. The primary difference is that they are also involved with design delivery, playing a very active role in design direction and critique, and occasionally serving as a “big project Team Lead,” spearheading important and challenging new product development.

The Shadow Strategy Team. With a Design Architect and Principal Designers in place, you now have the constituents of your Shadow Strategy Team. Instead of a separate group of strategic designers, they are woven into the fabric of the producing design organization.

The trick is, how to get them working as a team? That’s primarily the responsibility of the Design Architect, with leadership support from the VP and Design Directors to protect some of their time for organization-wide efforts. At a minimum, this team meets weekly to share what’s happening in their worlds, and to ensure efforts are connected across the end-to-end experience. Occasionally, the Design Architect may engage Principal Designers on vision and strategy work, with the benefit being that these Principal Designers ensure that the vision is grounded in the reality of the business areas.

Recapturing some of the Dream of UX

A common frustration among digital designers is how their practice has been reduced to production. I think a reason for this is that our organizations lacked creative and strategic leadership—we assumed it was coming from the executives and directors, but they were too busy just keeping things going. So it just wasn’t happening.

By having roles within this explicit focus, these super-senior practitioners provide can recapture the untapped potential of thoughtful, intentional design.