A new breed of design leaders

Visuals from Moyo Illustration Pack

UI/UX Designers have increasingly started working with Product Managers and stakeholders to further evolve into Product Designers. These designers aren’t just glamorous order takers to complete a design task and proceed ahead to complete another. Rather they think about design from the product perspective, mapping out the entire end-to-end user journey and experience. As designers think about products more and more, there has been a topic that keeps coming up in the forums and on social channels like LinkedIn — Can Product Designers become Product Managers? or Are Product Designers equipped to do a Product Manager’s job?

The answer to that question according to me is a big No. Product Managers do a lot more than just create JIRA tickets and write PRDs on Confluence. There is a long list of things that Product Managers do that I don’t believe most designers are going to enjoy doing daily. There’s not one hard or soft skill that I can point to which Product Managers have, but overall they are masters of communication and alignment.

Though Product Managers are always going to be there. There is a need to bring more product-led people into the tech ecosystem. Based on how I see the market changing, there will be two things happening for a while at least —

1. There will be an influx of Senior Product Designers (SPDs) joining the system. Junior or mildly experienced product designers are going to get promoted rather quickly (2–3 years) to get to the Senior Product Designer level. This is because there is a need to take ownership of a larger chunk of design duties for which Senior Designers are better equipped. Some designers will be able to do this task with ease while others will struggle with leveling and toggle between IC2 and IC3 levels for a while before they get comfortable.
2. People who will get promoted above IC3 levels like either M1 or IC4 levels, need to be strong product-led design leaders. Since the market is inclined towards SPDs, the number of folks above the IC3 level will be less. It’s a risk that most companies won’t take because everyone won’t be comfortable with the hierarchy that comes with it.

I have talked to a few industry leaders on LinkedIn in the past couple of months to jot down seven qualities that product-led design leaders will exhibit. This post is about those qualities that my interviews have produced.

#1 Customer-Centric Strategizing

The design lead will work closely with product managers, shareholders, and tech enablers alike to establish and execute a customer-centric strategy. This will be pivotal for design, as someone from a design background will be in the room speaking for the users and thinking about the design scope that the business has in mind.

Design leads will represent the product in strategy meetings where issues are discussed and decisions are made.

#2 Design Priorities

Like other design leaders currently, product-led design leaders will continue to lead one or more product design teams and help the designers execute challenges. These challenges will flow in from strategy meetings hence, they will include both business fulfillment and user problems. Both of these together will supply the design roadmap items.

#3 Career Resourcing

The folks that will report to product-led design leaders will need to continue improving their skills and strive towards helping other designers reach their career goals. To fulfill these goals, they will need to highlight various skills, experience benchmarking, and the impact they are supposed to make on the product during their leveling journey.

#4 Design Quality

One of the things that will make the product happy is by noticing sound design judgment, and output quality. Design leads will play the role of reviewer and framework creator. They will need to look at the design from a scalable lens and design frameworks that other designers can follow to provide long-term results will high quality. Designing and setting up frameworks will require them to provide continuous feedback. While giving a go-ahead on designs, will require them to seek executive alignment.

#5 Success Metrics

Some product manager duties will be shared by future design leaders. Setting up success metrics is one of those critical tasks. Design leaders will responsible for defining product success metrics together with product managers. But on an individual level, they will be responsible for setting up metrics and key results that are user-experience and journey related.

#6 Research & Analytics

I think design leads are already doing this. But it is worth mentioning that they will be seen working closely with the UX Research members as well as the Analytics team to inform the roadmap for gathering insights. These insights will help product managers, designers, and engineering managers to guide decisions and solutions for the product.

The direction that analytics is pointing toward will help the research team set priorities and set up sessions that can help the design inform about critical user insights. Design leads will act as a glue between analytics and research. Design leads can also let other design team members learn these skills and help them progress ahead in their careers. Setting up dashboards, how long to run a test, which methods to use when doing quick research, and topics like when to use quantitative research vs. qualitative research — there will be a ton of these topics that needed to be tackled across the entire design team involved.

#7 Design Leadership Alignment

This will be never-ending activity and oftentimes slow in terms of progress but critical. Since design leaders will have access to larger stakeholders, they will be responsible for frequently aligning with them, mainly design leaders. The alignment will enable the product to provide a unified, cohesive experience to the product teams as well as to the end users.

That’s the end of this short yet hopefully insightful read. Thanks for making it to the end. I hope you gained something from it.

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