Managing Designers

(Mis)understanding Management

It is a common misconception that when someone moves into management, they become more indispensable to the company. Yet, when mass layoffs take place, one of the most impacted groups is typically middle management. A number of large companies have stated their desire to use AI to flatten their organizations, essentially removing middle management from the equation.

Why is middle management often seen as a liability?

Why Does Middle Management Often Fall Short?

As an organization grows, the founding team becomes very stretched. They hire managers in the hope that this will help their growing staff continue to be effective and to produce valuable results for the organization. They are often disappointed by the results. To explain this, let's dive into some common archetypes I've seen managers fall into:

• Generalists. These managers give out very generic advice. They keep the team in line with common best practices, but they don't understand how to adapt them to different contexts.
• Pushers. Pushers demand results but don’t know how to achieve them. They like to talk about big ideas, but they don't know how to help the team build the connective tissue between vision and achievement.
• Caretakers. These managers make sure their employees are OK from an HR level, but not much else. When it comes to the day-to-day challenges of their team, they don't have much to offer.
• Craftspeople. These managers teach advanced craft, but don’t know how to (or resist the idea that they need to) make trade-offs to constraints or business needs.
• Glorified individual contributors. When managers are promoted from within, they often have difficulties making the transition from individual contributor to manager. This often results in individual contributors who have a few management rituals, such as one-on-ones with team members, but who are still primarily concerned with their own projects.
• Gatekeepers. Gatekeepers often have a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes their team effective. To try to keep them productive, they wall them off from the rest of the organization and make themselves the single point of contact.

What Management is Really About

If you’re a manager of designers, your job isn’t just to match them to available work and keep them busy. Your job is to help align their efforts with tactics, methods, and practices that will produce traction for the business in the context in which they’re working. You need to nurture their vision and sense of how they can produce tangible results when faced with different challenges. If you don’t know how to do this, you’ll need to learn.

To be clear, I’m not advocating for the idea that only designers can manage designers. Managers that come from a design background often struggle with demonstrating how design activities impact business outcomes just as much as anyone. Regardless of what background you come from, here are some tips to help your designers connect their work to the bottom line:

• Help them identify where an impact can be made. To many employees, company initiatives such as “increase retention” seem abstract and out of their control. Identifying for your designers key areas of the product that need improvement (“users drop off dramatically at step 3 of the renewal process”) and giving them the time to work on solving that problem builds understanding of how and where they can have an impact.
• Empower them with user analytics. Just about every software company should have access to an analytics suite in this day and age, even if it is something free like Google Analytics. Make sure your designers have access to your product analytics and make sure they understand how to use and understand them. This gives them the opportunity to proactively identify opportunity areas for furthering company goals.
• Monitor and discuss analytics on new features for at least a few weeks after launch. The metric that most employees naturally believe to be most important is pleasing their boss. On a software team, most people interpret that as finishing projects and shipping on time. If you monitor analytics with designers post-launch, you show them that the thing that really matters to you is the impact that a feature has on users and the business. Depending on the feature, you may want to:
  • Launch a simple one- or two-question survey to gauge people’s satisfaction with the new feature
  • Help designers track new revenue from paid features and products
  • Discuss engagement metrics, including time to adoption. Just be careful to avoid vanity metrics such as page views.
• Reframe design critiques around impact, not aesthetics. 90% of all comments I’ve heard in design critiques have to do with colors, fonts, and layouts. While visuals are important, your designers will benefit far more if you put the majority of your focus on the question, “will this drive the outcome we’re looking for?“ Ask:
  • What user behavior will this drive?
  • How does this change or improve what we have today?
  • What must this design accomplish to successfully drive our business goals?

• When introducing new work to designers, frame it in the context of the business need first. So many software teams work through a backlog with little more than a vague understanding of why they’re working on it. Framing new work in the context of, “we need to lower churn by 25% by December” or “this will help us retain a $3 million customer” establishes:
  • The stakes of the project
  • The size of the impact that needs to be made
  • The amount of effort that may be involved
  • How creative they and the team may need to get to solve it
• Structure regular meetings around reviewing analytics, business needs, and progress toward goals. Once a designer has the context of business goals, they will start to lose sight of them as they get into the nitty-gritty work. They (just like anyone) will need regular reminders that help them to orient and reorient their efforts.
• Connect them with people in other departments. Find opportunities to connect designers with individuals who know the business cold. Connect them with business analysts, if you have them. Consider inviting them to product strategy or go-to-market meetings. Encourage them to talk to Finance about revenue targets, margins, and churn rates. Help them understand this not as extra work, but as core context they will need to make better design decisions.
• Help them understand the operational costs of design decisions. Designers are often unaware of the downstream internal impacts of their work. Help them identify areas where they may unintentionally increase support calls or slow down onboarding, as well as areas where they can reduce the friction and load of supporting the product.
• Encourage them to think about cause and effect. Many design choices are based on either satisficing (getting something serviceable or good enough) or delighting users. It is rare that designers are encouraged to form hypotheses around how their designs might alter user behavior, and how that changed behavior might lead to business impact. Encourage them to articulate cause and effect hypotheses when presenting their work; “if users do x, it will lead to y.” This will help them connect how people work or utilize your product with how outcomes are achieved.
• Reward them. While shipping a big project is certainly worthy of celebration, that is usually the last that software teams hear about it (outside of bug reports). Bonus programs are nice, but they often feel arbitrary and outside of their control. If designers (or any team members, really) help achieve a business outcome, promptly reward them. This can take many forms, such as a celebration, recognition, spot awards, etc. Take the time to get to know what types of rewards motivate your people, and be prompt and generous with them when they play a role in achieving a business outcome.