Your job needs a new job description
Your job needs a new job description
Design leadership is a heady blend of Culture, Strategy, Organisational Design, Talent Management and Collaboration. So just the easy stuff.
For many people in design leadership positions, the idea of a concrete job description which accurately describes what they spend their days doing is novel enough to be laughable. Design leaders often come to this work through internal promotions which anoint leaders into hitherto only imagined roles whilst other times the role described when they were hired was written by someone who had never done the job themselves and had an at-best vague sense of what they needed someone “running design” to do.
So, we need a new job description. Let’s look at what it should cover. And perhaps there is an interesting exercise for us all to do off the back of this in writing down an accurate description of our actual jobs for probably the first time.
So… what is it you do exactly?
Every company is different, and so we’re not going to write the perfect job description here, but what we can do is consider both the job as it exists today, and the job you’d like your job to be if only you could stop doing all of the other stuff that keeps getting in the way.
Harking back to my “working in tech is an act of optimism” gambit, an optimistic summary of the role of a design leader might be something like this:
”The role of design leader is chiefly in creating and sustaining the conditions under which great design work happens. It is in developing and attracting world class talent which accelerates the progress we make versus that of our competitors. It is in partnering with colleagues from across the organisation to support and supplement their capabilities with strategic design partnerships. It is in developing and disseminating an understanding of user needs which is woven into the fabric of corporate decision-making and providing user-centric balance to business-centric metrics. The result of this work is brilliantly designed products which serve their users and their organisations equitably.”
That is a reasonable start. We’ve talked about the role as one which spans culture, strategy, organisational design, talent management and collaboration. That’s probably a pretty good encapsulation of what we’d describe this work as given ten seconds to do so. Moving beyond the summary, let’s talk a bit about the *how* of each of those categories, because it’s one thing to do that stuff, but quite another to do it well.
Culture
What does “good culture” look like for a design organisation? In some places, it is probably entirely about the efficient handover of artefacts, in others it might be about just not being an impediment to progress. In a design mature organisation, it is more than that, and you should take this opportunity to make explicit your aspirations for design to be more than that for your organisation, even if it feels a long way off.
A culture which creates great design work is one in which practitioners feel psychologically safe and in turn empowered to do ambitious work, it is one where they have the support of an emotionally literate manager and leadership staff. It is one where there is a consistent focus on the quality of the collective output, paired with a generosity of spirit which guides how feedback, critique and professional development are managed.
To be a designer is to care about the human experience, and so we should expect that design teams are made up of passionate, empathetic people who thrive in a culture which values - and is designed for - that kind of intense caring.
Strategy
Strategy is a view of the world we seek to create over the long-term, and whilst there are entire functions dedicated to doing just this, design leaders are critical cogs in the strategic machinery of a business. Your job description should include explicit mention of the role design plays in both informing and conceptualising what the strategic direction of the business needs to be.
Whilst other functions can talk about this in long strategy documents, we are uniquely positioned to be able to show what that direction looks like in a way which can engage everyone. Developing a long-term vision in partnership with the rest of the business is a fundamental part of the role of a design leader, and one which demonstrates the value of this role beyond the day-to-day operation; making design an asset the company leverages in both the short and long term.
Org. Design
Designing a design organisation is not like designing an engineering, product or data science organisation. The specific requirements placed on design, it’s relative scale and the nuances of the work itself create a need for ongoing work to design and iterate on a model for how design functions. You may have an established view of the specific flavour of org. design which works best for your business but the important part is that this is recognised as a part of the role which doesn’t go away.
Design teams scaling beyond 1, 10, 50 and 250 people require completely different architectures and infrastructures, and it behoves you to be thinking about this as an iterative, evolutive process as opposed to one which requires massive organisation change on a semi-regular basis. Org. change done well happens slowly enough that no one notices and quickly enough that no one felt the pain of delay.
Talent Management
If you’ve built an org. that functions well with a culture that creates the conditions for great design work and have been able to create room for design to inform strategy, the individuals in your team will have the breadth and depth of opportunity required to make meaningful professional progress.
However, it is a rare designer who doesn’t also need support in acquiring and honing new skills, or who doesn’t come up against blockers to progress at some point in their career. Managing talent well requires explicit goals at the individual level, and systems through which those goals can be achieved - be those on-the-job opportunities, or formal learning programmes.
It is not enough to adopt a sink or swim attitude to talent, and whilst hiring can augment even the shoddiest of internal talent development programmes, it too is not trivial when done well and is only ever a short-term fix because the people you hire will have their own knowledge gaps and stretch goals to achieve too.
Collaboration
The image of design as a solitary act done behind closed doors by precocious geniuses is alluring for a certain type of designer, and we’d all quite like a bit of peace and quiet on occasion to do some real work, but great design almost always happens in the open as a collaborative process across disciplines and departments. As a leader, you set the tone for this as the representative for design at the highest level, and the behaviours you model in your collaboration with fellow leaders will cascade down and be mirrored through the organisation. You must therefore find ways to work across silos and departments for the greater good of the business, create ways for your team to do likewise, and for the fruit of the joint labour to be recognised as a direct result of designs ability to unite people behind a shared vision.
If you can figure out how to write a job description which succinctly and simply expresses those things, you will be well on the way to describing what good design leadership looks like, and creating a document which you can point to when you are next asked “what it is you do, exactly”, it may also help your manager to understand your role better, and to be more useful in supporting you to do it.
It might even accelerate the process of finding your replacement when you decide you’ve finally had enough and are moving to Peru.
Stuart.