Author: Peter Merholz

Thesis

Design maturity models are oversimplified frameworks that mask the necessary nuance to understand and develop an organization’s ability to get the most out of a Design function. That said, used responsibly, they can be a helpful heuristic, particularly early on, for orienting yourself in an organization. 

The futility of maturity models

Hang Xu has identified design maturity as a frame for better understanding the challenges the UX/Design community has been expressing. As a recruiter, he’s attuned to the impact of an organization’s maturity on a practitioner’s ability to succeed. He’s been writing a bunch on LinkedIn on this subject, including this recent post on probing and assessing an organization’s maturity. In direct communications with me, he’s asked for my take on the subject, and, as I see the concept of maturity come up more and more often in my work with design leaders, I figured I’d publish my thoughts. 

When we were writing Org Design for Design Orgs, I researched UX/Design Maturity models, as I thought they’d be helpful for grounding our discussion. What I found then (and still, largely, see now) is that these maturity models are too simplistic, reducing a bunch of factors into a single-number linear framework. Through my experience, I knew that a single organization may be at multiple places along the maturity line, which suggested that it wasn’t a useful tool for diagnosis.

My frustration proved fruitful, as it lead to writing chapter 3: The 12 Qualities of Effective Design Organizations, which is probably the single best chapter in the book. Instead of a single overarching maturity model, I believe it better to rate a set of qualities independent of one another, coming up with a kind of ‘report card’ for the organization. This specificity and nuance allows people to zero in on specific issues worth addressing. 

Erika Hall shared with me (in a direct message) her frustration with UX/Design maturity models as being “nonsense because they’re overly simplistic, linear, and…absolutely ignores the business model.” She then expanded on this on LinkedIn:  

Step 0 of “design maturity” is aligning the fundamental business model with the wellbeing of *all* users of and stakeholders affected by the systems being designed. This includes workers, communities, and ecosystems.
Otherwise, it’s just increasing levels of acontextual organizational proficiency in candy-coating extraction and exploitation. And then, what’s the point?

The utility of maturity models

So, if maturity models are so dumb, why do they persist, and why can’t even I shut up about them? In my work with design leaders, I’ve found that there is some value in the abstract concept of maturity as a guide for how to engage with their organization. This came up in the most recent episode if Finding Our Way, where Jesse and I circled the subject, and I reflected on Jehad’s comment that some design leaders shouldn’t go to the lengths of trying to ‘demonstrate impact,’ because the company might not be ready for that, but to instead to tune your message to the company’s maturity, which may involve a different means of ‘showing your worth.’ I then dug into this thinking on the intersection of UX Metrics and Maturity.

Jesse, in his work with his coaching clients, has developed a framing of ‘three trajectories’: organizational maturity, design maturity, and leadership, and how navigating the intersection of these trajectories is crucial for any leader wanting to operate at their fullest potential. (It’s worth reading his post, so go there and do that now.)

(Welcome back.) 

As long as you don’t take a maturity model to be prescriptive, but instead a tool for initial orientation, they can be a useful heuristic. If you have to use one the Nielsen Norman Group one is probably best, and appears to have become the standard. Interestingly, if you strip away oversimplified linearity, and look at the constituent factors (Strategy, Culture, Process, Outcomes), it’s even more useful, as it affords some nuance, akin to the 12 Qualities.  

UX/Design leaders often get caught up in their personal missions, their narratives of change and impact, and believe they just need to “educate”, “persuade,” “evangelize” their point of view, typically one of customer-centricity and the importance of quality, in order to influence those around them. This proves ironic, as these UX/Designers who espouse ‘outside-in’ when it comes to delivering customer experiences, now practice “inside-out” when trying to get what they want.

In my work with leaders, I counsel them to “connect the work of UX/Design to what the Business values,” and to meet their leaders where they are on their maturity curve. This means listening to them and their concerns and responding to that, not foisting your desires upon them. 

This came to mind as I read Janice Fraser and Jason Fraser’s recent book, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama, a practical guidebook to lower-stress leadership. It features a sidebar from Hannah Jones, now the CEO of the Earthshot Prize, and formerly Nike’s first Chief Sustainability Officer (a role she had for 16 years). She shares how she practiced change, and features this bit of wisdom:

“The advice I would give people undertaking to change an organization is to understand motivation… Motivation is at the root of most human behavior—and most people are pretty entrenched in what their motivations are…If…you’re not critical or judgmental of them, then you can start to meet people where they are and bring them with as you allies.”

She then shares what that meant practically:

“So sustainability as ‘hug a tree’ wasn’t getting us anywhere. But once we framed it as a risk mitigation effort for the board, a financial benefit to the CFO, and a growth opportunity to the innovator and the CEO, we could start to pull levers with far greater power than when I had remained entrenched in my own language…

“…Know your place in the system, but know other people’s places and benefits and why they…[are] doing what they do. Then figure out how to make their worlds feel better to them. ‘Make everybody else the hero in the story” was one of my mantras.”  

This resonated with something I posted a while back, how Billie Jean King got women paid the same as men for professional tennis, the heart of which was: “Just understand their side, so when you sit down to speak, and have dialogue, you actually have some understanding and empathy for them. And, if you can show that, I think they’ll start to think about you in a different way as well.”

In my experience, UX/Design types do more to constrain their ability to make an impact than anyone else. Rein in that missionary zeal in favor of making a connection. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have an idealistic agenda, but don’t assume what motivates you motivates others. Does this mean you’re playing politics? Yep. That’s the job.

Since I’ve become independent, perhaps the most common request of my time is helping companies develop good career frameworks for their UX teams. There are many reasons why they want them:

  • Provide clear professional growth paths
  • Smarter recruiting and hiring practices
  • Less biased performance management
  • Better alignment with other functions (e.g., product management, engineering)

In creating these frameworks, I resist linear “career ladders,” in favor of “trellis,” as my experience with people in UX is that they seek a bushier, less-directed growth, and these frameworks need to be flexible to handle the range of practices (design, research, and content) within UX. 

I have created a masterclass out of my approach to building these, and will be teaching it at the Design Ops Summit on October 5-6, 2023. You can register for the whole conference or just my class. Either way, use code MERHOLZ-DOS2023 to receive a discount. 

The Building Blocks of a Flexible Career Architecture

To create a robust architecture requires a set of components that interact with and build on one another. 

Capabilities

The skills, behaviors, mindsets, etc needed to do the work:

– Craft skills

– Strategic mindset and tools

– Professional abilities

Practices

Within any function is a set of Practices.

For UX, that’s typically UX Design, UX Research, and Content Design. 

Levels

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. 

Roles

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

In the masterclass, we dig into each component.

Capabilities

We start with Capabilities as they are the ‘atom’ in a career framework. What are the skills, mindset, and abilities at the heart of the work? Through our activities, we’ll land on a Capabilities Taxonomy, which may look something like:

Craft

MAIN

Interaction Design
Visual/UI Design
UX Writing
Information Architecture
Planning Research
Conducting Research
Analysis & Insights

EXTENDED

Accessibility Guidelines
Inclusive Design
Service Design
Prototyping

Strategy

Experience Strategy
Technical Literacy
Business Savvy

Professional

Communication and Presentation
Collaboration and Facilitation
Structuring and Planning Work
Domain Knowledge
Navigating the Organization

Practices

The practices in an organization are an amalgam of craft capabilities. In the class, we’ll help you identify your distinct practices. In the UX organizations I’ve been supporting, it usually shakes out to something like: 

Practice Product Design UX Research Content Design
Core skills Interaction Design
Visual / UI Design		 Framing Research
Conducting Research
Insights and Analysis		 UX Writing
Information Architecture
Description Conceptualize, structure, and detail our offerings within the context of a broader user journey. Conduct research to identify the wants, needs and abilities of customers and end-users, translate those insights into recommendations from strategy to detailed design. Shape experiences using content and language to build user confidence. Plan, create, and structure product content.
Core activities Understand needs and behaviors; develop insights; diagram flows; design wireframes and prototypes; test solutions Develop hypotheses; identify methodology; plan research; conduct research; analyze data; synthesize findings; present insights; provide recommendations Explore voice and tone; Plan content governance; define standards for content types; develop end-to-end content strategy; draft content for end-to-end product experience; review content

Levels

Many career architectures start with Levels, but it’s only after Capabilities have been determined can you build a Levels framework, because how someone advances in their career is contingent on the development of their capabilities.

Years ago, I published the levels I created for the Snagajob Design team, and it has since become a starting point for many UX orgs. My thinking has evolved since then, and I prefer to start with a simpler overview of Levels, to then save the complexity for when folks are ready to dig into the details:

Detailed table of a levels framework.

In the masterclass, we dig into these specifics, as well as how levels differ for people on a Management or Individual Contributor track. 

Roles

Where we end up is a set of distinct roles that make up the UX organization. I find it helpful to visualize the org with each role shown:

This visualization makes clear the main paths through the organization. 

But wait, there’s more

What I’ve shared covers the core of the masterclass, but there’s a bunch more we address, including detailed rubrics for each Capability, the variety of ways people can grow in a Practice, how team members can use the tool to chart their career growth, how to roll out a new career architecture, and the difference between Professional Development, Performance Management, and Promotion.

If you’re reading this before October 5, 2023, you can sign up for my masterclass at the Design Ops Summit. If you’re reading this afterward and are interested in this material, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. 

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.