What should designers be doing in their roles?

There’s never been more demand for design. There are so many first-time designers & first-time design managers. Also, non-design leaders manage design leaders for the first time. It’s going to take time before companies understand & benefit from their design investment. Here are some thoughts captured over 1.5 months across design, leadership, problem solving, and remote work that can help teams solve for their people and boost productivity at work.

Leadership

1. Retention is becoming a real design leadership problem. The solution to retention is recognition. People who are regularly recognized will unlikely look for a new job elsewhere.
2. More individual contributors (ICs) are moving into management to grow. Unfortunately, IC and management paths don’t provide equal opportunities to grow professionally and financially. Unequal career ladders are bad for both the orgs and the ICs.
3. Design scaling is directly proportional to the number of successful outcomes repeated over some time. Processes help with the results, but building processes have nothing to do with scaling a design practice.
4. Empowered leadership leads to building an environment that allows others to make more decisions. But, of course, leaders shouldn’t make decisions; they should be setting up the direction that empowers others.
5. Design managers need to start canceling 1:1 meetings that serve no purpose. For example, if you don’t plan for the meeting invite, it’s time to let your direct report invest that time somewhere else.
6. Leaders need to start rewarding long-term strategic thinking and shun short-term reactive action.
7. Large organizations need to optimize heavily for driving meaningful outcomes over quicker outputs by empowered teams that understand the direction they should aim in the long run. Most timelines are hypothetical; getting there a few months later is always okay.
8. The best way to remove suspicions, reduce isolation, drive ownership, and boost the team’s morale is by being more honest about what’s not going well for the organization and how everyone can do their part.
9. New design managers need to realize that they are no longer a direct contributor; they’re now a force multiplier. Leaders should help them recognize that their value no longer comes from natural craft skills; it comes from building an environment where others can contribute more.
10. As a design leader, if you are to change expectations mid-project, then at the very least, acknowledge the change and explain the why. This will give teams a chance to reflect on the impact that the change will drive.
11. Designers, engineers, PMs are all builders & creators who can benefit from time spent with the customers. Spending time interacting with the audience will enable you to learn and see the impact of your work in action.
12. Design leaders need to invest time and resources to foster relationships across the organization and with customers before they are looking to need them at a critical time. It will help the leaders build credibility and allow access to incredible insights and learnings.
13. As a manager, whenever your team disagrees with you publicly, you can make it a point to appreciate their pushback and genuinely understand their opinion before agreeing or disagreeing with them.
14. Design leaders need to be recognized more on how much time they spend backstage holding the spotlight for their team vs. for how much time they spend under the spotlight.
15. The tremendous success of a design leader is to empower their team to make small, inconsequential decisions themselves without scheduling a discussion with all the stakeholders in the company.

Design as a Craft

1. Designing with only stakeholder buy-in is like creating a solution for the stakeholders and not the customers. It will only make the teams feel better about agreeing to the output.
2. The best part about building a design system is to learn and practice development experience. Design systems are more than just visuals/UI being standardized; it is about bringing designers and developers closer together, developing a common language.
3. Before you advocate your design thinking on others, be open to learning from other team members’ design thought processes. Design is more about collaborating than supporting.
4. Use design competitor study as a secret sauce to shape/expand the horizon of an emerging feature/domain/category. Competitor study should be used as an opportunity to learn more than the mindless competition.
5. Designing solutions for the sad path can help products reduce user churn. Designers and teams can learn much more by designing for the painful way than for the happy course. Think about how you can guestimate if a user is about to abandon the product and bring the user back to using the product after uninstall.
6. As an IC, be very transparent about what you want at work to succeed. Do not block yourself before getting an official NO from your manager. If you are making a non-standard request, then make sure to find bases for a reason, prepare a deck (maybe), and make sure you strike confidence when asking for what you want.
7. Before embarking on a new product or a feature redesign, start with a sound investment in user research so that you don’t have to redesign again in a year or two.
8. One of the designs of the unique thing can own and drive is the ability to break the silos between domains and facilitate end-to-end experiences in many ways (even remotely).
9. We need to stop using Figma for presentations in large organizations because Figma enables designers to optimize the FigDeck for looks over stakeholder collaboration and easy adaptation.
10. Designers at the Senior and Junior levels need to invest in skills not directly related to their craft like — communication style, marketing ability, collaboration, building relationships, etc. Investing in these can be the superpower that can change your career trajectory.
11. Designers need to challenge other stakeholders in the company with uncomfortable questions about deeply held beliefs about customers, end-users, and specific verticals. It will help organizations to build robust end-to-end experiences.
12. If you want to change, it is easy to change the process at a small scale and convince others by showing them how it might have worked. Thus, making the change and testing it at a small scale is a much better way to achieve shared outcomes than making philosophical arguments.
13. Support your design decisions with data and use research; make sure to present your assumptions and data-based design decisions separately.
14. During 1:1s, ask your manager about —growing your scope, opportunities to demonstrate & develop leadership skills, presenting more work more often, mentoring others, and owning portions of the process.

Remote Work

1. Collaboration costs time and effort. Although collaborative partnership brings alignment, inputs from different tribes of people, it reduces the execution speed.
2. Transitioning into remote work requires changing the way we work to accommodate a small async environment. It will require more than just video calling software and a home-desktop system. It will require a cultural and ops change that forces organizations to change and embrace the transition fully to “remote work.”
3. Remote work relationships, more than ever before, are built on trust and human interaction. To foster connections, we must listen to the cues from our team and optimize for those cues. A considerable part of the workforce is scared of joining a new company because they have never met anyone in that organization. They are looking forward to working in remote silos.

Problem Solving

1. When applying and building machine learning and AI models for your organization, focus on use cases where they can be applied to improve the experience significantly. In this case, innovation is more about finding unique ways to apply ML models in the product.
2. An organizational structure should be built around maximizing the desired outcomes. For example, if an organization is constantly creating and thinking about what needs to happen in the future, re-org will not result in hundreds of good people being laid off.
3. Centralized autonomous teams need high functioning leaders and a mandate to achieve great things for the organization overall.
4. Minimal viable products pale in comparison to minimal testable hypothesis, MVP<MTH. An MTH is a Figma prototype or a react native code built using hard-coded components. It is the fastest route to testing your hypothesis with the least amount of effort and a higher degree of learning along the way.
5. The easiest way to solve complex problems is by giving them more time and focus. The flexibility to remove certain parts of the process and add new ones can help teams deviate to a new path and solve fascinating problems.

Thought Process

1. Curiosity is the missing ingredient that can allow designers to level up. Curiosity can be about people, problems, the existence of the issues, solutions, inner workings behind solutions, and curiosity to find your way from scratch.
2. When designing an annual roadmap, decide on what NOT to do over what TO-DO. It is part of strategic planning that enables you to list dozens of things you should or shouldn’t bet on in the next calendar year.
3. During your next annual roadmap planning, spend time planning and “how” while also planning for the “what.” The meaningful outcome can be driven by innovating on operational efficiency.
4. Making meetings more effective should be a part of the annual planning for teams. This small change can drive the 1% headcount efficiency that most leaders are struggling to find. A simple way to achieve this is by collecting information about what is not working, improving continuously with every meeting while also addressing foundational efficiencies.