Note to New Design Managers

Managing designers is a logical career path people choose when they’ve grown into their careers a fair bit. While in larger companies there are established programs to coach people into management responsibilities, you don’t always have this luxury in startups.

Having elevated a handful of talented folks into design management roles, I’ve come to observe a few things they can benefit from when they take on this new responsibility.

I often get this question – “Hardik, what should I keep in mind as I take on the role of a design manager? Some advice please?”

To them, I say this:

Managing your own time

• Make sure you intentionally structure your day around the most important priorities - don’t leave it to your peers or stakeholders.
• Get comfortable with declining meetings (with justification) that lack purpose or where your contributions aren’t clear upfront.
• Review designs first thing in the morning, unblock designers with actionable feedback.
• You will be evaluated on 2 key things as a Design Leader - What you delivered (quality of the work) and How you delivered (speed of delivery, number of escalations required, amount of design rework it took, timelines adherence…).
• Org priorities are never flat and equally distributed across the entire projects spectrum - understand the truly important items and focus your time & energy on them disproportionately - you’ll only get the correct info on the org priorities from the top - don’t make the mistake of calibrating your priorities from the hearsay on the floor / the bottom.

Making better decisions

• Get comfortable with waiting to take important decisions until you feel confident or sufficiently informed.
• But also know that most decisions are changeable later and waiting longer to take those decisions doesn’t always lead to better quality of decisions.

Communicating effectively

• Use conclusive & definitive words when you write – this is a lot harder than you think. After you write something, it helps to ask if what you’ve written can be misconstrued. You’d be surprised by how often that would be true.
• Communication that is open to misinterpretation or inconclusive will most likely be taken so. Edit until you’re absolutely sure. Get important communication peer reviewed.
• Use simple words and bullet points. Break down sentences.
• If a person needs to do something and you’re assigning that work to them, make them acknowledge it. Also, ask for a time commitment for completion of said work. Make sure the commitment is written down.
• Verbal communication, commitments and agreements don’t exist.
• Schedule important messages - gives you time to edit and make them better in the meantime.
• Keep your response time as close to 0 as you can for your direct reports and your boss.
• Group DMs with 2-3-4 people are one of the most effective ways to drive projects efficiently behind the scenes - bigger channels for large announcements & alignment after you’ve done pre-alignments in smaller groups.

Taking stakeholders along

• Try to have the debates loaded with opinions in person and synchronously - the tonality, expressions, emphasis and nuances make all the difference in getting the alignment you seek. This is very hard to do over Zoom. Save your face time for the most important discussions.
• It always helps to do a mini roadshow with the most important stakeholders for bigger ideas in order to understand their concerns or potential pitfalls earlier – these help you in strengthening your idea further. The more time you spend doing the legwork, the easier it gets to get the uber alignment of the key people.
• Communicate in writing after you align in person.
• Whenever a written discussion goes on for more than 5 exchanges, get on a call or meet in person.

Prioritising & scoping better

• Recognise that these are very hard to do well - and so very few do these well.
• It is healthy to debate the prioritisation of a project if you are not sufficiently informed or confident about dedicating resources to. As a manager, you’re allocating resources you manage and are responsible for. The more effectively you map resources to the priorities, the happier your team will be and the larger their overall impact would be.
• To understand prioritisation, ask ‘Why is this the most important thing?’ ‘What other things did we explore?’ ‘What company objective is the current priority linked to, and how directly is it linked to it?’.
• To understand scoping, ask ‘What’s the single most important thing here to get right?’ ‘What’s the one thing we cannot do without?’ - and then literally scope the project around just that.
• Remember, you’re accountable for what your team spends their time on.

Managing your own team

• Continue to make individuals accountable for either more projects, or larger responsibility & scope until the arrangement breaks - you want to keep the scope just under their breaking point. This can be a bit controversial but if you have a team full of folks who want to grow faster, they won’t mind. Growth is meant to be challenging.
• And then you need to help level them up through coaching and giving feedback.
• You ought to demand more from the team. But also, you need to support them better. You can only demand great work for them if you’re supporting them through clear prioritisation, necessary focus and continuous feedback.
• Don’t keep work timelines vague - ask them to turn around work within specific timeframe. It helps to even go granular at day-level.
• Protect your team’s time & bandwidth at all costs - sometimes even at personal cost.
• Use every opportunity to highlight team’s achievements (even if small) and impact - never disregard the importance of a public appreciation.
• Your goal is to help each member of your team realise that they’re capable of way more than they think - emphasize this every time they enter this steer close to the zone of higher performance.
• Don’t delay critical feedback - the longer the delay, the less effective it will be.
• Poor coaching upfront results in more ‘managing’ later.
• If your work as a manager doesn’t gradually reduce, it’s a telling sign that the team isn’t upskilling quickly enough and more active coaching is needed.
• Learn to tell an amazing story to explain a project to your team to get them excited - an excited and less talented designer is more useful to work with than one that’s not-so-excited and talented.
• Set up rituals and follow them - simple things like posting daily updates, sharing highlights / lowlights become useful repeatable behaviours that bind the team together and help build an important identity.
• Do small things really well to set an example - don’t tolerate repeated slack even in small things (“Oh it was only 15 min late”), messy files, poorly worded communication, grammatical errors, disrespectful or dismissive tone, unacknowledged threads and so on.

Managing your boss

• Senior leaders really care a lot about high priority projects and want to constantly keep their bosses informed about quality & progress - help your boss do this well by supplying them with timely and comprehensive updates.
• Never delay escalating cultural or cohesion issues related to the team.
• Identify scalable solutions to repeated problems and propose them proactively - senior leaders love efficiency gains through systematic solutions for problems, especially from managers who are closest to the problems i.e. Notice different pods having different / ad hoc / randomly timed project discussion timings across all pods? Set up a single weekly connect with PM leads to save everyone time.

Being a solid designer yourself

• I’ve rarely seen a pure people manager who can command respect and admiration from their team without being exceptional at design themselves.
• Even as a manager, you should pick 1-2 complex problems yourself and partner with a direct report. This not only helps you lead by example, but also becomes an invaluable learning experience for the apprentice.
• Ensure you get continuous stream of feedback on your own craft.
• Create forums to showcase and celebrate excellence in craft visibly across the team i.e. present a killer documentation of a project, show a cool prototype, show a solution to a complex UX problem, contribute a useful pattern to the DS, solve a nagging issue in the product.

Behaving like a leader

• Be extremely optimistic and show it - never pander to pessimism vocally or even otherwise.
• Never partake in spreading negativity.
• Be the source of confidence for people around you, your team and stakeholders - this does wonders in a demanding workplace.
• Don’t respond while you’re angry - you’d realise that people act irrationally or haphazardly because they’re either cornered or pressured into action - be forgiving and supportive. Losing your temper never helps.
• Actively empower others around you. Using “This should be your call” or “II trust you to do the right thing here” go a long way in making people feel important and involved.
• Understand the role of stakeholders in great depth to develop empathy. You won’t win the battles just through your own functional authority. You’ll need the support of your Engineering and Product partners to achieve anything significant.
• Always keep your word. If you can’t, apologise visibly, take ownership and follow up with professional reparations.

Hope these are helpful.