This past year, I’ve helped a few companies looking for design executives (“Head of Product Design,” “Chief Design Officer,” someone reporting into the C-suite, and may be in the C-suite) by developing a profile of the role that they can hire against.

Often, these companies begin with a fairly rudimentary understanding of the role, focused on some form of “being a creative leader.” Through my efforts, I’ve developed a four-part framework (different than the other four-part framework I shared earlier) to break down the responsibilities of what it means to be a design executive.

Executive

An organization-wide leader (not a “design leader”). Their ‘first team’ is with other executives, and the responsibility here is to bring a design-and-user-experience-informed perspective to company challenges—planning and strategy, business success, etc.  

There are also expectations for representing and advocating for Design throughout the company, its potential, and what it needs in order to be most effective.

Creative

As the head of a creative function, there are expectations around how this person inspires, and holds the Design team accountable to, the delivery of high-quality work.

In terms of practice, their work is oriented on systems and strategy, with the primary output of cohering the work of their team in some kind of end-to-end experience. This is particularly important if they’re overseeing Brand/Marketing and Product Design. 

People

As someone leading a sizable organization, they are responsible for building a healthy, performant, and long-lasting team. 

This includes overseeing recruiting and hiring processes, career and professional development, establishing a compelling team culture, and designer-friendly day-to-day people management practices. 

Operational

This role requires facility with the operational realities of an organization at scale, including people, process, programs, communication, coordination, annual planning, budgets, onboarding, managing partners, and more.

They may be able to delegate this work to a Head of DesignOps, but they need to know what it means for these efforts to be humming. 

With these four aspects identified, the next challenge is figuring out how much effort the Design Executive is expected to put against each area. It won’t be an even 25-25-25-25 split. It will vary from company-to-company, depending on the context in which this role resides. Generally, I think the following percentages are a good place to start:

Executive: 33%, Creative: 32%, People: 20%, Operational: 15%. 

The idea being that the bulk of the Design Executive’s effort is on the content of the work (Executive + Creative being nearly 2/3rds), while recognizing that there are very necessary People and Operational efforts necessary to maintain organizational health. 

Also, what often happens as an organization grows, is that the People and Operational aspects end up taking the majority, if not all available time, because they are the elements that must be addressed in order for anything to work.

When that happens, a framework like this can be a helpful diagnostic for that design executive to go to their boss with, and say, “I need to hire a Head of Design Operations” or “I need Design Directors,” so that they can return focus to the Executive and Creative work that is expected of them. 

In my next post, I’ll address the makeup of the Design Leadership Team, that includes that Head of Design Operations and Design Directors.