When thinking about a leadership framework that connects business objectives with product team success the following are a few attributes I have found to be helpful.

What are aspects of leading design?

Care for people

The number one key to remember is you don’t run a team, You have been entrusted to help them succeed in the context of helping the greater business succeed. This is a weighty responsibility and thinking this way helps keep me in the right headspace.

Language translation is a must
Breakdowns in communication and expectations are the most common downfalls of struggling teams I have seen. It’s an area I myself have had mis-steps, owned and been able to learn from. Designers speak a specific language and so do engineers and many other group. It all starts with first aligning with the strategy and goals of the business and then beginning the process of translating to your team. If the team can hear the signal in their language they will know where to go to score a win for the company.

One on one’s

One on one’s should be used to check on your team member, not just ask for status updates alone. Ask how your team members or managers are doing? Always connect the work completed to the goals of the company and see if they are in a flow state with their work. If there is something they would like to move into that they would find more fulfilling that can be a way to improve morale while at the same time tuning productivity. I believe that everyone has a flavor of work that they find easier to fall into a flow state when working on. When the type of work is a good match with the designer they are humming along and being challenged but not overwhelmed. The best part about this tuning of work to people is how it can be positive for everyone: the designer, the team, the leader and the company. Lastly, if the team needs equipment, software, or training and it’s a reasonable request, go to bat for them so your team is not frustrated, bumping their head against a blocker.

Promote clarity of purpose

For your team to be effective they must be crystal clear on two questions, what’s important and why. As a design leader, you are on an expedition and what’s important to the business is your map, the why is your compass. Once you listen and ask enough questions you should start to uncover the answers you seek and then you can verify that you have the correct interpretation and prioritization.

Design is about removing all difficulty and impedance to a user completing a task. A key factor in that journey is communicating clearly. The ability to inform the user about where they are, what is being asked of them, and how they are making progress is essential in reducing stress and frustrations. Looking at the ability of recruited candidates to communicate and express their ideas could be one of the best indicators for a successful product designer I have seen to date.

1. Ask leadership in the business “Why” 

2. Clarify and prioritize what’s important for the team to accomplish. Know how they will be evaluated and ask “What does success look like” from the business.

3. Communicate what you are looking for from the team. If your company does performance reviews for example, go get those right away. Start them out on the right foot and help them to succeed.

Take notes from demos and retrospectives to gauge if you and the team are going in the right direction or if changes are needed.

Build a healthy environment

1. Build a mentorship culture, pairing, connecting and sharing learning.

2. Try to set an example of positive behavior by avoiding gossip and politics. You have a job to do and if you are doing it right you should be too busy for the water cooler.

3. Own the mistakes of the team. Be sure to shower credit on the team. When things go wrong be a funnel and things go right be an umbrella.

4. Reinforce work/life balance. Let the team take a break, go for a walk, get a coffee, play a game, etc. Play promotes creativity and high morale. It recharges the batteries and in that reset the brain can often find a way around the problem or uncover unseen risks.

Fostering great solutions

Innovation
I care deeply about the principles of ethical design and delivering a delightful experience. I find inspiration in the fact that everything we see and touch was first an idea in someone’s head, carefully crafted and brought into the physical world. It can feel like magic if you lucky but it’s only a mirage. The best UX processes have an aspect of recognizing human error and revising built in. Many have felt passionate about an idea just to see the market calmly say “hell no.” Take the unicycle. It’s a cool idea, however someone stepped in and built a better design that the market appreciated more. People valued more stability and ease-of-use, so today we see more bicycles. This game of try and see, or “iterative improvement” is an exciting game to play. There is a real gravity to the potential of what lies just out of reach. As a leader it’s important you give your team the confidence to reach up and pull down those ideas into reality. Given that, I have a strong passion for connecting the needs of business with the needs of the market. It does not matter if you are in a B2B or B2C company, you always have to keep being a customer advocate. No matter how good of a designer you are, if you don’t have signal alignment to what the business values, you are a customer advocate blowing in the wind. There is a saying in product that I love. It’s more important to find what’s right than to be right.

Passion
As a leader, passion is something you can’t fake. You either have it, or you don’t. I like hiring passionate people but it’s not as easy as finding the most exciting and outgoing personalities. Passion can be extraverted or introverted. This passion, it’s more internal, a leaning forward, a drive to make the best solution and a hunger for excellence. You can see examples of this passion in people like Sheryl Sandberg and Michael Jordan.

Curiosity
When I think back over some of the mentors who gave me advise, set me straight and helped push me forward many of them rose into high levels of leadership yet they remained relevant. This gets harder the more experience you gather and the higher you go. Having the ability to keep up with the newest trends, tools and techniques you don’t have to be the best but it helps to be aware of what’s out there because it moves so fast. It’s important to stay curious. I like the below quote.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once they grow up.

—Picasso

In design, looking past the obvious answer and learning to think outside the box has been a powerful tool. It’s important considering how fast the market moves to stay flexible and adapt. There might be a better way and a new way to solve a problem. There are many exercises to explore the creative curiosity like Storyboarding, S.W.O.T., 6 Hats, Reverse brainstorming, Crazy 8’s etc. I would put the importance of lifetime learning into this bucket too. So try and see, learn and improve. Over time you will build up your own collection of mental frameworks that serve your style of operating.

Desire for excellence

It’s important to set a high bar for quality. Equally important is clearly and crisply setting the vision of the mission or the “Why.” Next, I find when stepping back and letting the team collaborate to find the “how“ they find a better solution that I could have ever dictated. That’s not my job unless I’m a contributor and it communicates to the team “I trust you“. Lastly, one of the most rewards parts is providing career mentoring, building leadership consensus and removing the team’s blockers. It’s crucial to manage anything that gets in their way before it grows into something more problematic. Set a lofty vision, measure progress, and be there to celebrate when it is achieved.

Find the right balance.

When is good enough really good enough? There are three frameworks I find helpful.

Closed hand, Open hand

A leader in a high position at a public company told a story in a workshop I attended a long time ago that I will never forget. He said, picture a person with two outstretched hands. The left hand is clenched into a fist. This is where we place and hold tightly to things that are timeless. Things like… We will always treat employees with respect. We will provide value to our customers at every opportunity. We will take pride in over delivering on our product objectives. Now look at the right hand. It is an open with the palm exposed. in this open hand rest things like… We will build applications with Java, GraphQL and React. We will use use X software tool to help us design and develop software. We will sell at this price and in this region. These things are timely and will come and go from year to year. We want to keep this hand open so we can let dead trends go and stay open to trying new methods and tools. Then he said, the biggest problems I see are when people get these two confused. They start making the temporary infinite and the infinite temporary. Looking to separate what is timeless and should be solidified into training, and the “How” items that are best left to the team to determine in the research phase has served me well. It has helped steer from dictating things like tools or enshrining a mythology as some part of the companies culture. This framework helps avoid falling prey to short-term thinking that pushes quick-win brand erosion over long-term strategic growth. In the closed hand are strategic principles and in the open hand are currently effective tactical means.

The 80/20 Rule

I like to use the 80/20 rule as a guide. It states that 80% of the positive or negative effects come from 20% of your efforts. That means that at any time 80% of the items you think are important really are trivial noise and distractions that should be ignored. This pushed me into being a bit of an essentialist. We can take process as an example. If I can bolster up the 20% that is effective and eliminate some of the 80% that is frustrating the team that’s a big improvement lever.

Finding and shifting these efforts will create a more positive, productive team and we can help avoid burnout. Design Systems are a prime example of the strengths of the 80/20 rule. If cross-functional teams can own and leverage pre-built patterns (Well designed, tested, performant solutions) then they can spend more time working on areas that otherwise may have skipped before. This also results in a more polished quality experience for the person who uses the end-result.