Leading with Impact: Top Things Every Design Manager Should Do
Deepen Vora
Hands-on UX Design Leader | Mentor | Specialising in Design Strategy | Leading B2B / B2C experiences
I have been in the Design Industry for over a decade and have spent last few years managing a team. Sharing my experiences and insights on what are some of the Top Things a Design Manager must do.
Typically there are 3 scenarios that a Design Manager has to deal with :
As a Design Leader / Manager, here are some of the things you can do
Know the Business
For the first few weeks understand the business / domain you will be working for. It’s crucial to get the entire picture of how the business operates at a high level which can give a birds eye view of the entire ecosystem.
Know the organisation’s structure
It’s very important to know the key stakeholders from Business, Product, Tech, QA and operations. Have Individual 1:1 with each stakeholder in the very first week itself to know to the team operates & what is the high level roadmap for next few quarters.
Know your Team
If you are joining a new company or moving to a new business unit with an already existing design team, it’s critical to get insights from your manager or the person who is about to leave the job on the current team dynamics & strengths, weaknesses of each individual. Have a 1:1 with each team member to know more about the individuals interests, passion & expectations.
Communication Channel
Add yourself and your team members to all important communication channels like email groups, slack channels, meetings, product standup etc. This will ensure that you have complete visibility of how things operate in the new vertical.
Ensure Smooth Transition
While transitioning from current team to a new business unit, it’s critical that the transition is very smooth for the existing team members and business unit so that work doesn’t suffer.
Communication
It’s important to communicate why the re-org is necessary for the benefit of the entire team and company as a whole. Make sure the entire team is aligned and there’s no panic within the team members. Ensure that there’s a proper transition plan.
Set Expectations
It’s critical to set expectation with all stakeholders (existing team + New BU) the work will slow down temporarily as there is going to be a transitional phase where someone new joining will take time to understand the business, set processes & get things running at a regular pace.
Documentation & Knowledge transfer
Make sure there’s proper documentation for the existing team or new team members who would be joining. Have an onboarding or KT session on some of the best practices / processes followed.
Set a Culture
It’s important to observe the current team dynamics & set expectations with respect to the culture you wish to build for the organisation & your team. A culture of sharing, knowledge transfer and mutually working together as a team to get the best outcome for the organisation.
Some of the things that can be done are:
Timings
Each individual has their own working style & some people start work early while some people start late & work late hours. It’s important to have a balance and ensure that there’s a common working hours that works for the entire team for cross team collaboration.
Allocation of work
Knowing the strength, weakness, passion, interest of each individual, you can come up with a high level team org chart in terms of who will handle which function. Once this is done, it’s important to discuss this with the team members about the plan & ask suggestions from the team in terms of what they feel. Take buy-in from the entire team & then make necessary changes if required by taking inputs from the team.
Cross Collaboration
Once each member is assigned to a particular function or vertical & expectations are made clear in terms of what they will be working on, they become the single point of contact for any business or product requirement. Having said that, there are cases where people go on leaves or quit the organisation, It’s critical that the team functions smoothly and work doesn’t suffer.
To ensure these things are in place, it’s best to setup a culture wherein there’s continuous knowledge transfer that keeps happening within the team. It’s critical that everyone in the design team knows what other team member is working on so that if someone is on a long leave or decides to work, the other team members can fill the gap. If a manager who handles multiple verticals & each vertical has a design POC, it can happen that sometimes work load in a particular vertical or business unit is less and in other function there is double the work. At this time as well, the other designer can pitch in and help in reducing the workload of the current designer.
Set Processes
With the new team, it’s good to have initial team meetings to understand their working style, the processes the existing team followed. Also, it’s important to communicate & show the best practices and processes that you have followed in the past. Discuss the pros and cons of both the processes and that align the team to come to a common way of working.
It’s important in the first month to set processes for the following
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Org Chart
An org chart helps the manager understand the different stakeholders in the business unit as well as the products under them. A particular Business unit can have multiple Product managers managing different products ranging a wide range of platforms like web, m-web, tablet, mobile apps. Once the manager gets a full visibility in terms of the entire org structure, then setting up regular sync ups with everyone becomes relatively easy to understand each PM’s high level yearly / quarterly roadmap. Later on, It’s easy for Manager to allocate work to designer based on this org chart.
Requirements
Establish common ground with the product & design team what is the bare minimum thing that is expected by the design team whenever a design requirement is given.
Typically there are 3 types of requirements
Track Updates
Jira is a popular tool used by most companies to track the day to day work of large teams. Each business unit can create the JIRA tickets of each tasks and subtasks which an individual is working on. Typically a program manager will manage JIRA tickets which are created by product which is then passed on to Dev, Design, QA and moved to respective statuses.
If there is a very big design team, a Design manager can also create a Design board which tracks activity of individual designers in the team in terms of who is working on which feature or project. This helps in resource allocation and team bandwidth. Design JIRA board is separate from Product / Dev JIRA board. Product JIRA boards are mostly for Dev’s & QA timelines. Hence a feature can have 2 JIRA tickets, one created by Design team for tracking designer progress while another ticket is for Dev & QA team progress.
Standups
A Daily 15 min Team standup is required to get quick updates on the following
This helps in getting the entire team aligned in the right direction & helps the entire team know what each person is working on in case there is an overlap.
Design Reviews
Set weekly design review sessions with the team. Idea is that all designers can share constructive feedback on each others designs & a designer can get multiple perspectives and solutions on a particular problem statement. A Design review can also help rest of the team get an idea on what other team members are working on & they can collaborate together in case there is a requirement overlap. Finally, A Designer is presented a platform to present in front of the entire team which can help in honing the presentation & time management skills.
Styleguide
If you are building something from scratch, It’s best to create a basic style guide & broad level page structure for web, mobile. A basic style guide includes the bare minimum things that the entire team can agree upon before getting started on designs.
This includes
While understanding the business as well the different products (either existing products or new ones) a basic style guide can help create a consistent experience across a suite of products for entire business vertical for entire design team. For example, Google may have an entire suite of products like gmail, calendar, google search, slides etc. However, they look as a part of the same family as some of the elements are common across the entire suite of products like typeface, icon set, form elements etc. Hence, it creates familiarity for the set of users who are using multiple products of the same company or business unit.
Having said this, once each designer starts working on each requirement, then multiples use cases can come up & hence after that a style guide needs to evolve and later on become a full fledged component library when the products are mature enough.
Finally
A Design Manager has to wear multiple hats and it’s a very tricky role. However, with the right intent and actions while being humble, the role can create a huge impact in the organisation by setting up right processes, bringing stakeholder alignment and building a good design team and culture which will create good impactful products.
Would love to hear your thoughts on Design Leadership & Management.