Role and Responsibilities of a Design Leader

I have managed or coached designers for several years now, and witnessed some great and bad leaders in my career. In this article, I wanted to capture precisely what I think being a great design leader means.

First, what is design about?

I always come back to this definition by Jared Spool: “Design is the rendering of intent” (link).

Design is about making deliberate changes to something (an object, a system, …) in order to make it better.

What is the role of the design leader?

The mission of the design leader is mainly to create the environment in which the design team performs to the expectations.

What is expected of design teams ? Serve customers with products they love, yet work for the business.

Design needs a fair amount of supporting activities to be done well:

Leadership and management are the two pillars that design leaders must provide to have a sustainably performing team. Every responsibility of the design leader falls in one or the other. I’ve detailed below what I think this entails.

1. Management

Help the team execute at the best level

Staffing

Recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, annual performance reviews, terminations, and promotions

Team topology

Structure the design team in order to best divide the work.

Coaching

Assess team members, create coaching plan, coach employees to grow

Team objectives

Contribute on definition with product leader and product teams, help the team staying on track

The objectives for the designers should be the product team objectives (e.g. team OKRs) and as such are the same as the product management ones.

Team performance

Define expectations, measure performance, lead continuous improvement (quality, coherence, cost, lead time)

More on continuous improvement:

It’s the manager’s job to make sure that the design work meets the needs of the company. These needs are always changing, so we need to have a team that is good at learning and improving. This means: How do I get the team to ship faster? What do we need to get collectively good at to ship quality design? What can we standardise? What can we learn to get better? And so on.

2. Leadership — Inspire and motivate the team

Product vision

Create, refine and share the product vision and principles, in collaboration with the product leader. In particular, help creating design artefacts that support communicating the vision.

More about the role of design in the product vision:

In an organisation that works with typical empowered product teams (with the Product Management/Design/Engineering trio), design vision and product vision are essentially the same thing.

The job of the design leader isn’t to invent an adjacent vision, but rather to assist the product leader in defining and sharing the product vision and principles.

The best way to share the product vision is through what’s sometimes called a “visiontype” or vision story (this Ikea Place launch video could have been a visiontype, since it does not involve actually building the product, and conveys the vision).

What is even a product vision?

”A good product vision serves as the North Star for the product organization so that we have a common understanding of what we are hoping to accomplish together.”

“When we tell the story of the product vision, we do so from the perspective of our users and customers. The idea is to demonstrate how their lives will improve in some meaningful way.”

“The product vision is one of our primary tools for keeping the organization truly focused on what the customer cares about.”

“It makes no sense for each product team to have their own product vision. That would totally miss the point. The product vision is meant to be the common goal.”

— Marty Cagan, EMPOWERED

Design strategy

Define and implement the design strategy. The strategy is the answer to the following question:

“What does the design team need to put in place in order to to deliver the experience and reach the company’s objectives?”

I am not referring to product features here but rather team capabilities. E.g. get really good at fast prototyping vs design very robust features, or ramp up our visual design skills to match the new brand positioning, or level up the company’s user research practices.

Design evangelism

Improve design maturity in the organisation (help teams get a deeper understanding of the customer, understand and apply design practices (process, user research, …)).

More about UX maturity: The 6 Levels of UX Maturity from Nielsen Norman Group.