Design Leadership Handbook

PRO TIP — What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
You’ll need to cultivate an entirely new set of skills to be an effective design leader. While Marshall Goldsmith’s book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There isn’t about design, it is about making big career transitions, and will give you the guidance you need as you make the leap from an individual contributor to a leader in your organization.

Avoid pay increases when transitioning someone into management. It incentivizes the wrong people to seek positions of power

a designer reports conflict between other team members, talk with everyone individually before taking action

Ask these sorts of questions in your 1-on-1s:
Short term goals: How do you feel the project is going so far? Are there any projects you want to work on in the near future?
Long term goals: What do you want to be doing in 5 years? What are your big dreams in life?
About the company: What is the company not doing today that we should do to better compete in the market? What’s 1 thing we’d be crazy not to do in the next quarter to improve our product?
Self improvement: Do you feel challenged at work? Are you learning new things? What area of the company would you like to learn more about?
Manager improvement: What could I do as a manager to make your work easier? Would you like more or less direction from me on your work? How can I help you with your goals?

You can, of course, blend models as well to create a hybrid design organization. You can position designers in a temporary cross-functional team to work on a focused project with a clear deadline, as is common at MailChimp. When they’re done, they return to the centralized design team.
You can distribute your designers in cross-functional teams, but pull them back together for design reviews, stand-ups, and fireside chats as Twitter does.

Build your team: Find people with the right balance of technical and soft skills for your team. You need to be searching for talent even when you don’t need it! Find the right organizational structure to make your team productive.
Manage: Evaluate each team member’s performance, coach them so they can grow, and minimize conflicts.
Operationalize: Keep your team moving efficiently by standardizing the design feedback process, managing projects, and coordinating with other teams.
Forge alliances: Build connections with other team leaders and executives to make sure your team gets what it needs.
Provide vision: Though you’re no longer pushing pixels, you still need to play a central role in crafting a vision for your product and brand

Key takeaways
Craft the vision for your product and communicate how it fits into the lives of others. This will serve as the North Star guiding all teams.
Use story to communicate a design vision. Video, storyboards, and comics are all great mediums to show colleagues the future you’re creating for your customers.

learn and think by drawing and doing

The act of creating a product story before you begin the design process not only helps you mobilize your teams, it also forces you to clarify your intentions for your product.

The storytelling mechanism you choose is less important than the story you tell.