Category: Leadership

One of the core tenants of human-centred design is, well, the human-centred bit. What this is supposed to mean is that we – professional designers (and their teams) –  create products, services, and interventions that consider the genuine needs and wants of the humans whose lives we’re trying to improve. And then actually improve them.

Bound by the rules of capitalism, designers, on the most part, have been engaged in a decades-long advocacy struggle with those who want more efficient and profitable businesses to, please, consider the people they’re making products and services for.

Over those decades, designers have attempted to develop tools and frameworks to help make their case more concrete, or present it in a language that the decision makers of businesses (whose primary concern is the shareholder), understand. Driven by the (perhaps fallacious) idea that what’s good for the user is good for the business, designers start at one end of the spectrum – absolute advocacy for the interests of those who use the products and services that are being provided by the business. The business owners start at the other – the most efficient way to maximise profit, reduce cost for shareholders, and deliver on what is often a pre-defined strategy.

Most designers know that the best way forward through any conflict is through compromise and so, over time, that’s what we’ve done.

Let’s for a moment, imagine a HCD Utopia

When I hear my peers describes their ‘teams’, I hear stories or various articulations of ‘the three-legged stool’. i.e. they largely consists of three primary roles – Designer, Product Manager, Engineer/s. This is currently ‘normal’ in technology-focussed teams. These technology-led cultures mostly consider this ‘multi-disciplinary’ and, most recently, our model of this is ‘maturing’ to include other business roles like Sales, Marketing, Subject Matter Experts and so on.

But, I don’t know any team or business today that employs the people for whom they’re designing; yeah, that’s right, employing the user. Not just employs them, but makes them equal and integrated members of that team. Even writing that sentence feels extremely radical. And, by employ, I don’t mean a token $60 for filling out a survey. I mean a long-term, project-length commitment to contributing to the design process – to literally be the human/s in the centre of the design process. Designers, Product Managers, and Engineers as peers to those whose lives we are trying to affect. What would that world be like?

What if users were working and being paid alongside us, as equals?

Guided by principles like, “No solution for us, without us”, the idea of true HCD is co-design (aka participatory design): absolute user integration into the design process. Not that designers and other technology professionals are somehow more superior or powerful in the process. What I’m talking about is true equality. It’s difficult for us to imagine this utopia because it so rarely happens.

In a perfect world, having the communities for whom we are designing be an integral, long-term, and consistent part of the design process is what human-centred design needs and, at the moment, very rarely gets.

What’s the next best thing to co-design?

Employing the humans for whom we are designing is nowhere near the Overton window right now. So, as good designers do, we’ve decided to take a compromising step toward the middle – a lean (and therefore cost-effective) approach to involving users in the design process. After all, employing the people we design for is comparatively expensive to asking them to contribute on an ad-hoc basis. We, as a profession, are currently satisfied with the ad-hoc basis of user input.

Getting regular and direct access to users in this lightweight way is still seen as ‘expensive’, ‘time-consuming’, and ‘difficult’.

Here’s where we currently are: The three-legged stool (all of which earn upwards of 150k/year each), give ‘incentives’ to users to participate in the design process in a lightweight way. Research methods like focus groups, surveys and so on, mostly at the beginning of the design process, is the ‘normal’ way. Teams offer things like $50 – $100 cash or vouchers to the people who’s information and context are critical to the success of the solution (and therefore revenue of the business). Even this model, as basic as it is, still has it’s difficulties. Some businesses have made this approach part of their day-to-day – they have dedicated budget for incentives and process like ResearchOps. But, a lot of the time, getting regular and direct access to users in this lightweight way is still seen as ‘expensive’, ‘time-consuming’, and ‘difficult’.

And so we’re currently in a situation where two things are true:

1. It’s still largely considered ‘expensive’ (both in time and money) to get ad-hoc input from the people and communities in which we’re paid to intervene and, hopefully, improve for shared value.
2. Driven by ideas like Design Thinking, most organisations have become comfortable with non-iterative, linear processes of “design & release” product development.

By combining these two things, we’re left with a process that masquerades as human-centered design but is so far removed from the principles of good quality co-design such that it becomes, in the most literal sense, unjust and potentially harmful to those communities that we believe we’re trying to help.

And then, there are personas

Having said all of that, I believe that most designers (and product teams), at their core, want to genuinely make things better in the world. And so, in a valiant effort to be more human-centred but still deliver increased profit and reduced cost to businesses, we’ve continued to try to find a better middle ground: How might we ensure that the team making decisions in their high-rise meeting rooms of the company offices (or homes), don’t lose sight of the human impact of the decisions they’re making; all without spending more money and time than we already had approved at the start of the financial year. Enter the persona.

At their core, personas are averages. (I’ve always hated them). They were the design community’s attempt to help non-designers in the team and business empathise with the people whose lives they were attempting to change without going to the cost of paying individuals, regularly, for their input.

We’ve created a habit of engaging the people we’re designing for mostly at the ‘start’ of the design process. We seek to understand their behaviours, needs, motivations and context through various research methods. The law of diminishing returns state we probably need 6-8 people. At $50 a pop, that’s about $300. Business budgets can typically swallow that. It’s the first part of the double-diamond, right? That’s easy to sell to the executive. A required step in a linear process. Approved.

And then, with that very limited set of information, we abstract our findings enough to create averages. We give them kitchy and further abstract labels like, “The dreamer” or “The planner”. We use age ranges or other general characteristics (derived from Marketing) like, 30-60 year old mother of two. We make nice little posters and present them to the business and say, “Here, here’s what your $300 got you. Valuable, right? Can we have more budget next time?”

And, in the moment, it feels good. The outlay has been minimal and we feel like we understand the people we’re about to design for. Then, with no additional input, we typically create solutions in our offices, in isolation from those people who gave us the critical information about their lives. We may test them but, increasingly, our product delivery culture has become one of shipping first and ‘testing in real life’ – move fast and break things, right? Well, that works if there’s time to iterate in real life, too, but that’s almost never the case. And, when you can ship to 2 billion people overnight, it’s outright dangerous.

But, it’s better than no user input at all, right?

Ah. Well. No. And here’s why:

1. By designing for averages, we create average design – solutions that don’t really solve anyone’s problem and, because of this, often create more problems.
2. Our product design culture is typically not one of build, measure, learn. It’s one of build, build, build. Businesses still think they require certainty – a top-down plan that can be communicated and set expectations with a board – so roadmaps are typically drawn months in advance, with ‘features’ already prescribed, and very little flex built in for teams to release something, learn something, and adapt (which was what agile was supposed to be for, by the way). It’s antithetical to the complex adaptive system that is the human/technology relationship.
3. Persona documents are very rarely (if ever) updated. They look and feel complete and factual. If the designer can abstract the groups enough they feel as though they cover ‘all of our target market’. New research often happens at a feature-level once the initial research is complete but that’s very rarely captured company-wide and shared across all design teams so we all end up working off bad, abstract, and old information.
4. Most worryingly, it’s changing our practitioners’ definition of what good human-centred design looks like – it’s now OK, in fact, ‘progressive’ to work in this way. New designers are watching experienced designers work in this way and calibrating their levels of what good HCD looks like. Research upfront, ideate, plan, then build, build, build until the end of the financial year and the budget’s gone. That’s not OK.

Complex Adaptive Systems

The thing with designing tools and services for humans is that the relationship between humans and their environment is a complex adaptive system. First we design the tools, then the tools design us. This means that the lean, linear, lightweight processes that currently characterises ‘progressive’ HCD in most larger organisations intervene in systems in ways that no human, no matter how much planning and research we do, can predict. We learn about the human/technology relationship only through interacting with it. It’s a hallmark of complex adaptive systems. It’s ecological, not engineering, and the way we design and intervene in people’s lives is not compatible with this.

What we need from design advocacy isn’t another presentation on the double-diamond methodology or another version of Design Thinking that further advocates for linear ways of thinking about design; we need to recognise and remind one another that the decisions we make about the ways we intervene in people’s lives have intended and unintended consequences every time because that’s the nature of complex adaptive systems. We need to remind each other that it isn’t the behaviour of “The Dreamer” that we’re trying to change – it’s quite literally Bob, Janet, Carlos, Mohammed’s lives we’re changing. It’s my parents. Your kids. Our species, and others we share the planet with. It’s either making a more equal and just world, or it’s doing the opposite.

We need to remind each other that the lives we’re intervening in are my parents. Your kids. Our species, and others we share the planet with. We’re either making a more equal and just world, or we’re doing the opposite.

When we’re dealing with complex adaptive systems, there is no solution, just better or worse. We need to get better at asking ourselves not “Will my boss approve my budget for research?” but “Who might this help, and in the same fell swoop, who might this harm.”

Where does Design go from here?

I don’t think there are definitive answers to this problem we face, to think that there would be is to ignore the same problem I’m describing; there are no solutions at all, only interventions. But, I’m finding that I’m running out of ways to tell some people why they should care about other people. I’m finding myself looking for people who already understand what I’ve been describing: We find each other, we have a great time, and the rest of the world can go to hell. That’s not good.

Maybe the neoliberal power structures that support capitalism will make this impossible at scale. Maybe all I can hope for are small wins. Maybe I can write and change the mind of the next generation of designers who can continue trying to explain to some people why they should care about other people. Maybe it’s about bringing the users for which we design into the team, as long-term, equally paid equals. Nothing else has really worked, has it? Maybe it’s time to try something different.

If we’ve learned anything over the past 24 months is that if everyone is dialled into a call individually, calls work better. With good facilitation, things are more inclusive, equal, and fair. Great meetings with loads of vision and lateral thinking can happen over a video-conference. Mics don’t always need to be off, or on. Neither does video. There’s a time and a place for all of those remote meeting settings so prescribing ‘a company rule for everyone’ doesn’t work.

You know what else doesn’t work? Two or more people dialling in from a shared webcam while the rest of the meeting participants dial in individually. No amount of training or self-control has been able to discipline the two (or more) co-located people away from engaging in a more fluid, richer conversation together at the exclusion of those who have dialled in. Body language is rich, turn-taking is slicker, the centre of gravity of an in-person conversation is so strong that it simply makes it much more difficult for someone else to participate when they aren’t in the same room.

So, where does that leave us? Well, if just one employee has to dial in, it leaves us having to support distributed working. There’s no middle ground. People need good AV equipment, good remote facilitation skills, an understanding of how turn-taking works in online video calls – they (and especially business leaders) need to know how to work in a distributed way. If anything, the idea of saying, ‘we’re hybrid’ sets up an office environment for failure not success. Things will only get harder until we reckon with the underlying question – what’s the office for, now?

What’s the office for?

The office used to be a place where managers would sit, attached to a factory, and make sure workers performed their jobs. But with knowledge work – work that simply requires a laptop and phone – work doesn’t happen in a factory anymore. So, what’s the office for now? Why do we think that ‘returning to work’ is synonymous with being at a particular place for a particular time.

Maybe the office becomes a meeting place? Maybe it’s a place for people who don’t have great working-from-home setups to get some distance from their home so they can work in an environment that’s more ergonomic and conducive to better focus for them.

Maybe it’s a place for people to have focussed collaboration space and work through gnarly problems together – problems that are novel, highly collaborative or where the multi-sensory component of the get-together is important to the outcome (like training). Or, maybe you think it’s still for leaders to ‘watch over’ their employees to make sure they’re still doing their job. But, if that’s the reason, then hybrid won’t work for you either – 100% in the office is probably more your jam because what that says to me is that you don’t yet trust people.

Some examples for re-thinking ‘the office’

Right now, what seems obvious is that to support distributed working well but also leverage the benefits of a place that many of us can decide to use at the same time, the office could be setup differently; to enable individuals to sit next to one another, without risk of background noise or mic crossover. This is easily achieved with some noise-cancelling software and a decent mic (call centres have been doing this for ages, by the way).

This idea provides a way for everyone to dial into remote meetings individually, regardless of location. It makes it inclusive for those who can’t make it in that day. Then, when everyone leaves the meeting, those who chose to work from the same place, say, ‘the office’, can still go to lunch together and enjoy the benefits of in-person time.

Perhaps pairing this idea with optimising the design of the space for larger collaborative group exercises as things head back towards something that resembles normal – work that enables experiential, novel, or highly-collaborative – gives ‘the office’ a different but more useful purpose than trying to cram everyone back into individual desks, only to have them all wear headphones anyway because open plan offices are terrible for concentration.

For some businesses, a communal space for employees still feels important – there are huge benefits to this, but it’s not an ‘office’ anymore. Words like ‘collaboration hub’, ‘meeting place’, ‘homebase’ feel a little more descriptive and true of how those ‘office spaces’ could be used now. No matter what anyone calls it, what it truly means is that there’s no such thing has hybrid because as long as we choose to support one person dialling in, we all need to have the distributed working skills to make it work inclusively and fairly for that one person who couldn’t be in that day.

Sure, there will be times that full teams can work together, at the same place and at the same time. Supporting distributed working also doesn’t mean giving that up. But, if teams also value inclusivity, even though they may have a space to share that’s sort of near where their employees live, it doesn’t mean they don’t need to invest in good tools, practices and processes to support everyone and not just the few who live within a commutable distance to a common space we used to call the ‘office’.

‘Hybrid’ is a false hope

The examples I give aren’t exhaustive, but it worries me to see that the leaders seem to be thinking that the decision to adopt a ‘hybrid model’ seems to imply some middle-ground. A little bit of a relinquishment of the absolute power an employer used to have over their employees. But, as businesses try to grow out of a pandemic, it’s the employees who have the power now, and it’s up to businesses to adapt.

A hybrid model doesn’t mean less work, it means more. Even partially distributed teams means you need to understand and nail how distributed teams work together, properly.

Hybrid work as a middle ground implies that the two ends of the spectrum (all remote, or all in office) are somehow more difficult now. But, to be in the middle means you need an even more nuanced understanding of how work works, what offices are for, how people behave in environments you can’t control, a recognition of the blurry lines between work and life that have always been there but are now more apparent than ever, and that even more elusive value for companies – trust in your employees.

What’s emerging is that for knowledge businesses, there’s far less physical time and effort required in leaning into distributed working as the way forward, regardless of whether 40 people happen to want to work from your collaboration hub for a day or two a week.

Using design to adapt to a post-pandemic workplace

I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the pandemic years helping organisations adapt remarkably well to a distributed ways of working and who are working harder than ever to get better at it. They are experimenting daily, working across time and the country to figure out what good looks like for the people they have employed – with all their neurodiversity and specific environmental needs. The results are happier employees & better quality work for the business. All that’s preventing every knowledge business from doing the same is fear. Most of the time it’s fear of ‘losing control.’

So, if you’re a leader whose curious about how your organisation could better leverage the benefits of distributed teams and the benefits of having ‘the office’, I’m happy to spend an hour or so listening and sharing what I know.

There are lots of things I love about academics. The passion they have for their work is one of them. So to is their understanding that exploration for explorations’ sake is a useful and valuable human endeavour. Solving chunky problems that others have never before solved, combined with passion and exploration is what helps to move us forward as a species – better health, better living conditions, better overall.

Academics don’t need to be founders: taking research to market doesn’t mean ending an academic career

But, their passion for exploration means that something else has to give. My experience of working in early-stage research commercialisation projects has shown that academics view making money from their work as ‘impure’. Commercialising research turns ‘exploration for explorations’ sake’ into ‘exploration for profit’.

Most academics I’ve known are not motivated by money, but by status and prestige – a tenure position, more grant funding, more published papers. That’s not a bad thing. We need those motivators. But I’ve also seen how commercialising an academic’s work has scaled their impact and affected hundreds and thousands of lives for the better. It’s not difficult, in fact, academics have already done the hard work.

Does the thing I discovered solve a problem for somebody?

The thing about academic research is that curiosity leads to knowledge and, often, knowledge leads to a solution that no one asked for. In design, we work the opposite way – understand the problem then find a solution to fit the problem. Neither way is better than another, the important thing is the match – does the thing I discovered solve a problem for someone?

Problem → Solution can easily also be Solution → Problem

The most critical part of this step for academics and researchers is understanding the difference between real-world solution and lab-tested solution.

Pharmaceutical research, and other regulated industries already has a defined pathway to market (trials → approvals → market) so I won’t cover that here. The type of academic discovery I’m talking about is non-pharmaceutical. And, from years of experience, I’ve seen first-hand that trialling a solution in a controlled environment (like a lab), and an uncontrolled environment, yields different results.

It’s important to understand if the product or service that’s been discovered from research actually solves a problem and for whom. It’s most important to be as specific as one can about the who → problem → solution as possible. The who bit, in commercial language, defines the ‘market’.

Are there enough people willing to pay for their problem to go away?

If an academic’s solution tests well for a particular cohort or cohorts in the real world, the next step is really quite simple and rather scientific. It involves answering two questions:

1. Who can benefit from this solution?
2. How much are they willing to pay for their problem to go away?

This is what designers and product people call “Commercial Research” and/or honing in on “Product/Market” fit.

Every founder and/or academic thinks that their work is the bees knees, if they didn’t they’d begin to question why they’ve spent (sometimes) their entire lives working on this thing that isn’t very good. And so here’s where a healthy dose of external parties can help – to validate or invalidate the assumptions made by those who believe in their work. It’s essentially peer review – and all academics know how useful that is.

How many is enough?

The ‘enough’ question (i.e are there enough people willing to pay enough for my solution), in the context of commercialising research, is typically considered at two levels:

1. Will I earn enough money to sustain the product over time?
2. Will I earn enough money to grow and make the product better, over time?

As designers and commercially-oriented people, we tend to err towards the second one – mainly because, when things become products, competitors exist and a business wants to remain competitive. To do that, one needs enough money to change and evolve over time.

What’s the optimal ‘business model’?

If it turns out that there are enough people who are willing to pay for their problem to go away, the next question becomes about the mechanics of how that might work. Digital products have all sorts of models: subscriptions, one-off payments etc, and I won’t go into that detail here, but this isn’t a difficult problem to solve with what academics do best – that’s right, more research.

The business model that a product begins with often changes and morphs as the solution is used – what’s good fuel for the child isn’t necessarily good fuel for the adult. And so the ‘optimal’ business model is an iterative process. It requires constant checking and validation of previous assumptions up to this point, an understanding of what competitors may be up to, and an eye on the future.

But, by this time – the research has been commercialised and it starts to live a life of its own; just like any ‘normal’ business: building teams, salespeople, staff, revenue/profit/expenses etc are all part and parcel of the transition of research to commercialised research. In my experience, this is the bit that scares academics who, primarily, want to keep being academics.

Academics don’t need to become founders

The pathway to commercialising research can seem daunting for academics who, in the end, just want to keep being academics. But academics very rarely work alone in their research. They surround themselves with professors, graduates, and other researchers who help them make better work and think through their work more deeply.

Commercialising research, just like doing normal academic research, works best with a team around the founding researcher. A good designer and good product manager can be an academic’s key to unlocking their research benefit to the wider world and the academic can keep doing what academics do best – to use their curiosity and passion for exploration: to find out the next thing that will improve the way we humans be humans.

My dad once told me that there are two ways to grow a garden. The first way is to pick the plants you love, regardless of which conditions they thrive in, and spend the time and energy supporting their growth. If you like mangoes and you’re in Melbourne then it’s possible to grow them, they just require a lot of care, attention, and work. You need to keep them warm and insulated in the cold Melbourne winter, and you need to keep them well-watered in the dry Melbourne summer. It is possible to grow a garden like this, but boy, it’s a lot of work for the gardener and the plant.

The other way to grow a garden is to take a bunch of largely random plants and flowers, throw them in the soil, ignore them, and see what grows. Some plants love the combination of the cold Melbourne winter and dry Melbourne summer. They will not only survive, but thrive, and best of all, they require little to no work. It’s possible to have a lush, beautiful garden in either scenario.

One way to look at growing a garden in the first way is a largely selfish, close-minded pursuit. “I like mangoes, therefore I will do whatever it takes to grow a mango in Melbourne.” The result is a lot of work and often frustration for very little (if any) yield.

Growing a garden in the second way requires a listening approach; an understanding and recognition of the plant itself – its preferred growing conditions – and the properties of the environment in which it’s expected to grow. The idea isn’t about what I want, it’s about making a match between the plant and its environment.

People may just be plants – we need sun, water, and food – but with more complicated emotions

In a people leadership context, I can’t help but come back to this advice from my dad about plants. It is possible for a person to survive in an environment that isn’t suited to their strengths, but they won’t thrive. It’ll take an immense amount of work (both on my part and theirs) for very little (if any) reward. One way to look at my job as a manager is about understanding the unique strengths of the people in the team and then going about finding or shaping the environments in which they’ll thrive.

Yes, sure, plants are not people. People can change and adapt in a way that plants can’t. That’s where a conversation can change things. If a team member comes to me and says, “Look, I want to learn the skills to help me thrive in an environment that I’m not naturally suited to,” that’s great! That’s when my job is to offer the right structure and support for that person to ensure that they achieve what they want to achieve – perhaps become more adaptable, more resilient, and more versatile. But, starting from a place of listening is the important first step. Understanding strengths and biasing toward those, rather than doubling down on trying to improve weaknesses as is the current default within a culture of individualism, is to me, a more positive experience for the person and the planet – whether your job is to help plants or people grow.

My career has been a series of fortunate mistakes, and I’m not sure it could have been any other way. I don’t know everything there is to know about building a design career but what I do know is that I love my job (even on the hard days). I’d love other designers to love their job to.

Careers, for the most part, can be accidental, but if I had my time again I’d consider the idea of designing my design career (in fact, I’m doing it for myself right now). And so, I offer this not as ‘advice’ that you can sue me over, but literally one perspective; stuff I know to be true from my own experience and what, with hindsight, I believe has led to where I am right now – a job I love with people I love working with.

Most career coaches will say, “Start with values”. To be honest, my 20-year old self, fresh out of uni, had no idea what values were, let alone self-aware enough to know what my values were. That may be different nowadays – the kids today are way more self-aware than I ever was. And yes, while values play an important role in shaping one’s choices, I believe firmly in experimentation first, values later. If you’ve never tried green tea ice-cream, how do you know you’ll like it?

It’s about direction over destination

At the moment, there are two things that very experienced designers end up doing:

1. Building great products/services
2. Building great teams that build great products/services

In parallel to this, very experienced designers can also be thought leaders – people who reflect on and share their deep experience with building great teams or products with the aim of helping the industry, as a whole, get better.

The pathways to get to these goals aren’t mutually exclusive, especially early on in your career. And, in my experience, the way to get to number 2 is to do number 1 first. Either way it helps to have a direction.

The pathway to learning how to build great products

One of the difficult things about Design is the lack of clarity on what skills designers even need. Stanford D School has a pretty good attempt, but it focuses very much on the abstract qualities of designers. Because they are abstract they feel pretty encompassing, but don’t really help early-stage designers whose focus is on building their Design toolkit so they can, in essence, do the work.

Right now, when I coach designers, I talk about 3 elements of the end-to-end product design process:

1. Research – Experience in defining the problem
2. Interaction Design – Experience in inventing solutions to the problem without the complication of graphic design
3. Visual Design – Experience in translating the solution into colour, layout, typography etc.

These 3 are very bare bones. Other designers will say it’s missing stuff, it’s not broad enough, etc. But, for simplicity, these are the broad categories of the work that I think are important when you’re in the early stage of your career.

Finding a way into design

Most designers are drawn to Product Design from either end of the design spectrum.

There are the ones who begin their career as visual designers. They are typically strong in graphic design and often (but not always) land in creative agency environments that value the emotional value that’s often so key in marketing and advertising websites and digital products.

The other person who ends up being drawn to design are the science-oriented folks – they find their way via discovery and research. They are often analytical and deductive thinkers. Some are also naturally lateral in their thinking.

Both starting points are valid, neither is ‘better’ than the other. They’re just starting points and they often emerge from the natural strengths of the designer. The first question to ask of any early-stage designer is “which end of the spectrum are you starting at?”

Which end are you starting at?

Once you know that (for me, it was visual design), you know what you can contribute to any job right out the gate. You also know what you’re not naturally good at, or, in other words, what you need to learn (i.e. where you may be able to grow). The most important thing is that, once you admit your strength, it’s now a much easier pitch to any future employer.

I have a great eye, attention to detail, and a natural strength in using graphic design to create beautiful and useful interfaces. My strength is visual design. Here, take a look at my visual folio to prove it. What I’d like to understand more about is Research and Interaction Design. Will I get to do that in the role you’re offering?

I’m curious and great with people. I love doing the work to understand people’s problems and presenting what I find to others so that we can solve it together. I’d like to know more about the process of taking those insights and turning them into solutions. Will I get to do that in the role you’re offering?

It’s pretty simple: Here’s what I can contribute. Here’s what I want to learn.

The next bit can’t be coached because it’s all dependent on the job you’re applying for but there are often two ways that teams operate, and it normally depends on how big the team is.

1. Small teams. They offer an opportunity for generalisation (or breadth). Designers in small teams tend to work across the whole design spectrum, end-to-end, because they have to.
2. Large teams. They offer an opportunity for specialisation (or depth). Designers in large teams tend to break down the 3 broad areas into specialised areas. There’ll be a Research Dept, and UI/UX department that sometimes, but not always, includes UI design as a separate function.

Specialise or Generalise?

Because of the principle of direction over destination, there’s no right answer to whether an early-stage designer should generalise or specialise. Both are useful.

By specialising, the designer will get much deeper expertise in the nuances of whichever end of the spectrum they’re starting in. That depth will always be useful in a career. By generalising, the designer gets a ‘flavour’ of the 3 broad areas of design and so this may help them discover which parts of the end-to-end process they like or dislike. That’s also OK.

Sometimes, and depending on the person, we decide whether we want to be a generalist or specialist really early on. That’s also OK. And, at the time of writing, the world needs both and the world values both roughly the same. There is no right or wrong, but it’s about checking in with oneself every little while, often with someone a bit external to the day to day (like a coach, mentor or someone who has more experience than you), to get a sense of which one is feeling right at any given time.

Sometimes, we think we want to specialise, and try really hard to do so, and build up a whole career and identity around being that specialist, only to start to become curious about generalising. This is also OK. We change, sometimes often, sometimes never. The important thing is that we’re being mindful of it if it happens, embracing it, and then setting ourselves up to follow this new curiosity, no matter how late in life it comes.

The time horizons are 10 years, not next job

First and second jobs are really just a starting point, although they don’t feel like that at the time. As difficult as it is, I try to coach designers to think on a 10-year horizon – by the time I’m 30, what sort of design role do I have. And then, we work, job by job, carving a path to get there, learning and iterating along the way, just like any good product designer does on their own product. That vision may shift based on what someone learns in job one, or job two etc, and that’s OK. It’s about making a conscious choice, every step of the way.

Correcting a ‘wrong move’

No matter how much research or interviewing we do with a role, we never know the truth about the day-to-day of a job until we’re living it. We may have been told that this role we’ve just accepted will give us depth in research skills but we turn out working end-to-end as a generalist. We may get a shit manager or mentor, and more often than not, the role changes as we’re working in it.

But, the thing about wrong moves is that they’re very rarely ‘wrong’. Often what we think of as wrong is that they just didn’t meet our expectations or the goals we set out to achieve. (That happens in products all the time, by the way). When it comes to designing a design career, it helps to re-examine the day-to-day work occasionally to see what we *are* getting out of it, because, even the ‘worst’ jobs are good for something.

Levelling up to become a great Individual Contributor

Over time, usually 5-10 years, people have had enough experience to be really good at something – either a really good specialist or a really good generalist. At the time of writing, and with an average of people staying in a job for about 2-3 years, that normally equates to 3 or 4 jobs. Those jobs may be at the same workplace, or vastly different ones. Once again, the individual can choose, over time, to specialise or generalise in the domains they’re working in. I know some designers who are corporate enterprise specialists. I know designers who are expert designers for start-ups. Again, there’s no right or wrong.

As one gets more experienced, and the day-to-day ‘hard skills’ become more second nature, a space arrives in the brain to think about higher-order questions like what am I finding meaningful in my work. Sometimes single domains and industries ignite a spark and a motivation to focus, or, like me, some designers find that really boring and enjoy diving into completely new industries every few months.

It’s not until this point that we begin to talk about values (that thing that most coaches start with). With more experience, the cognitive load of learning the ‘hard skills’ has reduced, designers begin to think about why they’re doing what they’re doing and the impact they’re making in the broader world.

Some designers, at this stage, commit to being a very senior ‘individual contributor’ because they love being on the tools and making stuff, and work to position themselves in domains or industries that give them fulfilment because it aligns with their values. Other designers start to see value in mentoring and coaching other, more junior, designers and pick a track that most businesses call “Design management” which is really about designing teams that build products rather than designing the products themselves.

Building great teams that build great products

In the same way that some designers love ‘being on the tools’, others love what is essentially a different type of design challenge – designing teams.

As any designer will come to know: people are complex. They all have different needs and life experiences that mingle together to form a set of behaviours. Those behaviours, given the right space, purpose, and context, can amplify things for the better. And, just like a great individual contributor wants to understand how their users will use their product and service, great design managers want to understand the designers in their care: what are their strengths and how might they be best directed in the context of a design team, and in a cross-functional one.

There are no ‘personas’, but there are roles

People who build design teams know what’s needed to make a great product: in a simplified sense, it’s depth and consideration across research, interaction design, and visual design.

And so, the design manager’s challenge is to grow an individual’s skills in the way that it aligns with their personal career trajectory, whilst, at the same time, thinking about how all those individuals can work together to amplify each other’s work and, ultimately, make better products and services.

Design teams have roles – Researcher, Interaction Designer, UI Designer etc that need filling. But designers all come with infinite complexity around strengths, motivations, behaviours, and they change, iteratively, as the designer themselves grows. The best design managers I know are constantly and iteratively checking on the individuals and the relationships between them and their colleagues, to provide perspective and guidance on how to ensure everyone remains happy & well.

Transititioning from Individual Contributor to Design Manager

Sometimes, these transitions happen naturally, other times require a distinct job or role change. But, the advice I give to anyone trying it out is that it’s roughly a 2-year experiment. In my experience, career growth and tweaking team relationships takes time. It’s not something a person can switch-on overnight (although, it’s possible to see ‘progress’ by then). And, without oversimplifying things too much (it’s much more fluid than this in practice), these feel like a good guide:

1. 6 months – understand the people within your stewardships as a design manager, and the environment they’re operating within. Individual strengths, career goals, ways of working, interests and curiosities, as well as things that are of no interest at all are all important on an individual level. Also understanding the team and organisation dynamics (the designer’s day-to-day ennvironmental context) is required to give yourself the best shot at creating happy and engaged teams (and great products as a result).
2. 12 months – with regular 1:1s, pinups, critiques, and opportunities for small feedback cycles, you begin to see how your attention on people shifts individual and team dynamics. 12 months also typically gives a design manager a round of ‘performance reviews’ – both for their people and for themselves – and provides a formal way of understanding growth and goals.
3. 6 months – a chance to explore a bit more depth in the ‘craft’ of people leadership and team stewardship and see if the wins and challenges of designing people and teams gives you the same feeling as shipping a cracking product that users love.

On ‘letting go of the tools’ as a design manager

Because of the almost infinitely complex and ever-changing nature of people, teams, and organisations, there is essentially infinite depth and iteration available to designers who choose the ‘manager’ track as their ‘craft’.

There’s a misconception that individual contributors reach a ‘ceiling’ in their craft earlier than a manager but, just as people are infinitely complex, technology and the way humans use and interact with it is also infinitely changing. And so, that ‘ceiling’ that people talk about with Individual Contributors isn’t one of problem depth or complexity, it’s simply money. The ‘market’ tends to value the problems that great people management and leadership solves more highly than the problems that an individual contributor solves. Good managers are also more scarce than good individual contributors and greater scarcity equals greater perceived value.

In my experience, a really senior individual contributor will always get value from picking up and understanding some of the skills of good design management – even if it’s not a forever career path. It isn’t necessarily about ‘letting go of the tools’ forever, it’s simply about broadening one’s skillset from research, interaction, and UI skills, to those things that organisations like to call soft skills.

And finally, on soft skills

In learning the craft of design – research, interaction design, and visual design, there’s a parallel track of skills that designers begin to build up from day 1 that often go unnoticed. They are used and developed by ‘doing’ the work. E.g. Presenting research to team members or other stakeholders. Taking insights from research and turning them into a product or service. Iterating through various UI design options to get to one that’s the ‘right one’. This parallel track of skills is what organisations and people tend to refer to as soft skills. Soft, because they go unnoticed and happen, often, without particular focus or structure. However, it’s exactly because we don’t cultivate them with intention, focus, and structure, that they can be quite difficult to learn.

The best thing any early-career designer can do is simply be familiar with them – giving them a label can often be just-enough definition for us to help pay attention to them as we focus on the more concrete processes and frameworks that often define our craft.

Empathy, or the ability to understand and share the feelings of others is critical. Without this, we’re unable to understand how painful or joyful something is for someone else. Empathy allows us to design the most positive interaction with a product or a business.

Communication is a no-brainer and whilst not specific to a designer, it’s what a designer does every single day. They need to communicate with users while doing research, with the team in building software or anyone who has an interest in the product and who need ideas conveyed clearly and concisely.

Active listening is part and parcel of being a good communicator. Asking the right questions at the right time can only come from truly concentrating, understanding and responding to others. It’s much harder to do well than you might think.

Self-awareness. A designer needs to know their own strengths and weaknesses, biases and preferences. Only by knowing these well can they perform effective and truthful research and devise solutions that solve problems in the way users need them to be solved. Crucially, this is often different to the way the designer or others in the team would personally like them to be solved.

Problem-solving is an obvious skill for a designer to have but nonetheless, can be difficult to hone. Yes, there are tools and techniques to learn how to problem-solve more effectively and efficiently but the motivation to solve it well is something a little harder to find. On top of this, designers are pragmatic and they use exceptional critical thinking. Nothing is perfect, but it doesn’t mean we can’t aim to be.

Imagination is the engine we use for coming up with new and innovative solutions to problems. The ability to create something from scratch that never existed before is unique and, to be honest, a bit magical. Designers are innately curious folk. They’re always reading, learning, watching and asking why. It’s this natural inquisitiveness that I think gives designers their great imaginations.

Lateral thinking is tightly coupled with imagination. The ability to view a problem from multiple angles, sometimes unusual ones, lays the foundation for a great creative thinker. Often, it’s the ability to borrow from different contexts and one’s own life experiences that strengthen this in a person. Whether you have experience or not, involving other humans will always produce more ‘lateral’ results.

Story-telling is innately human. It goes to the core of what we are as a species — but to tell a good one requires practice. Designers can spin a good yarn and it’s important. Not everyone in the team will get the chance to talk to users and so it’s up to designers to convey what they hear and learn from users in a way that’s compelling. Designers need to help the entire team build the same level of empathy for their product’s users so that everyone knows the problems they’re trying to solve, and why it’s important to solve them.

Humility. Let’s face it, no one knows everything. Designers are intimately familiar with the design process and the methods and tools they use to do great work, but at the end of the day, they’re human too. They make mistakes, get tired, under sleep and over-eat too. They might misread a user’s expression, or over-emphasise things occasionally. But, they’re also lifelong learners. They use the power of the team to reduce the risk of getting things wrong. After all, great products aren’t built by just one person and a designer is always part of a team.

Nothing is forever: constellations not paths

In my experience, designers seem persistently concerned with ‘the path’ – If I make this decision then there’s no going back. i.e. Individual Contributor or Design Manager. Visual Design or Research. Product Design or Service Design. But, what I’ve found is that design careers aren’t a set of binary decisions.

As people change, so do their interests, curiosities, and abilities. People get bored, or they discover new things. Technology and teams change and new opportunities for exploration and discovery emerge. Designers are, in general, curious folk. And Design, in general, is almost infinitely broad in its scope. As a professor of Design once said to me, Design is Everything.

And so, when I think about ways to define or design a design career, my conceptual thinking brain lands at constellations, not paths. The idea that designers can hope from one knowledge star to another, following their interesting and curiosities as they go. And, as long we remain reflective on our experiences, self-aware enough to know what we enjoy and what we might like to do next, a design career seems to be one of lifelong pursuit.

The skills a designer accumulates in research, interaction design, visual design, people leadership, and soft skills, (at any specialisation) are applicable in almost any capacity across any human endeavour – whether that’s building physical or digital products, or addressing some of the world’s most difficult and complex systemic challenges.

But, if the ‘user’ in the story of designing our own career is ourselves, it makes perfect sense to have a peer or two to check-in with – someone to give an outsider’s perspective, challenge our own biases, and help us think through our own tangle of thoughts to work out what we truly want in every new step in a career, or in the next job. That the direction we set at the start of our careers is still what we want (or now don’t want).

After all, how we spend our time is how we spend our lives and so isn’t it worth approaching it all with self-reflection, curiosity and optimism as we do with any design problem we work on, at whatever scale? To trust in the process of ‘build, measure, learn’ to iterate toward a career we’re enjoying and happy with? It’s what I’ve done and it’s worked out for me. I’m hoping that amongst all the nuances and differences amongst us, there’s a common thread that connects us through our practice.

More importantly, in my most recent iteration, is that I’ve discovered that I really enjoy helping others work it out for themselves, too. And here I am. I don’t know what’s next, but hopefully, it centres around helping others work out their path, too. Chances are I’ll learn something from their stories along the way.

Free 1:1 advice available

If there are designers out there, of any level or experience, with whom this has resonated, and they are struggling to find decent leadership in whatever role they’re in at the moment, I am always happy to chat – for free – about their design career. I can offer frameworks and tools to help designers think about their design careers so that they feel comfortable and confident in honing their craft in whatever way suits them. Sometimes having someone listen is all that’s needed. Please contact me if you’d like some time to chat.

I‘m 67kg, slight build. If there’s something heavy that requires lifting, I’m not the first person that someone asks. In fact, if I was asked, I’d probably decline knowing that it’s likely I’ll do my back or damage something in the process. The last thing a workplace needs is an OH&S issue with an employee, right?

But when it comes to mental health, we don’t have those visual signals that communicate that we might be better at certain types or ways of work and not others. No one can look at me from across the room and see that I’m capable or not capable of managing many high-pressure projects at once, or successfully switching contexts every 2 hours to a different problem with a different group of people. No one can easily see that I work best on a maker’s schedule (in focussed half-day increments) and not on the manager’s schedule of something new every hour. Some find that type of work exciting and interesting – they thrive. Others don’t. And now, in a context where we’re working in distributed teams, no one can look across the room at all because we’re not co-located anymore. There’s even greater natural invisibility of how someone’s coping with the way a team may be working or how a leader may be structuring their day-to-day.

A more nuanced conversation about mental health

Anyone who’s done any work on their own mental health knows that good mental health comes down to two things: self-awareness and being able to talk about it. They’re probably two of the most difficult things for any human to do because, from a very early age, we’re encouraged to do the exact opposite – bottle it all up.

Managers of my past, not all, but certainly most, have excelled at telling me what to do and how to do it. And, with so much time spent telling, they’ve been terrible at listening. They’ve assumed, very wrongly, that whatever they were capable of doing, I would be too. That whatever motivates them motivates me. Where my manager may be motivated by growing a business or team, revenue numbers, and ‘headcount’, they never took the time to understand how I was different. I looked like them, and if they could do it, couldn’t anyone? If I was struggling, I’d just have to try harder.

We don’t assume that when we’re lifting a piano, though.

Listen first, then lean into strengths

What it comes down to is that we’re all built differently – different strengths, different weaknesses. It’s an obvious thing to say out loud but it’s surprising how little it’s acknowledged or forgotten in the day to day of leading people. And so, just as someone may be better suited to hauling a piano up some stairs than others, the same is true for managing multiple projects, switching contexts, working under tight timelines. Some thrive, some barely survive.

Understanding individual’s strengths, then building a team with complementing ones, means not everyone needs to do everything and the team ends up greater than the sum of its parts.

Personally, I find deadlines provoke anxiety, not motivation. I get more energy from a short thank you from a team member than seeing revenue increase. I prefer small, tight teams where everyone knows eachother’s name. I love ambiguity and complex problems and can sit in uncertainty and concentrate for hours to work through something chunky. Sometimes I like virtual lunches, and sometimes I don’t. I value and am motivated by generosity and reciprocity, not competition and domination. The managers who took the time to understand that saw the best parts of me, and, in some cases, friendships blossomed. Managers who didn’t left us both tired & frustrated (and left me looking for another job).

Stopping for breath

It’s difficult for leaders to prioritise stepping back and reflecting with their individual team members on what’s working well and what’s not. In a business where it’s all, “we needed this yesterday”, most managers and employees are struggling to play catch-up let alone assess the possible carnage or opportunities that lay in the wake of forward momentum.

Structuring conversations about reflection need to be the first-step. “In the last two weeks, how have you found the work? What do you like or not like about it? What’s been giving you energy? What’s been taking it away?” It only takes an hour every 2 weeks.

Over time, these moments of reflection accumulate and begin to shape a picture of the individual – not one of their physical abilities, but of their mental and emotional ones. Once we can understand the environments in which each team member thrives, then leaders get to focus on their real work; shaping the environment to suit the individual. If it’s true that people are like plants, then maybe taking this approach will lead to better outcomes for everybody.