Leadership Potential
Identify what Design Leadership looks like in your organization regardless of your role or path
What is Design Leadership?
We’ve covered some of this before. As you make inroads and strides in your Design career, you’ll eventually find yourself choosing between career paths — one of those possibilities is moving up the ranks as a leader of a functional area of the company. To be sure, this applies many product or product-adjacent functions beyond design as well.
“Yeah, but I cho(o)se the IC track, so none of this applies to me,” you say to yourself smugly, either in your own head or brazenly aloud because you think we can’t sense your snark.
What good leadership looks like
Carlos Yllobre put together a phenomenal post detailing the three basic things every design leader needs to know, including tactical recommendations on how to achieve those things.
In short, Carlos focuses on the following:
Know Your Team
A strong leader will be primarily focused on the health and success of their reports and colleagues. This means understanding how to leverage strengths, account for weaknesses, and foster growth.
The post goes in depth on stand-ups, 1:1s, and other team-building strategies to achieve this. One thing we’d add and we’ve seen, particularly in high-growth environments, is the need for these leaders to be personally and aggressively involved in recruiting efforts.Know the Product
This is table stakes as a product leader — because folks in these roles aren’t focused primarily on the discipline, they can provide their teams with the leverage and framing to help your team execute
Deep knowledge of the product, its capabilities, contingencies, and constraints will help you identify ways your team can ship their projects sooner! Or alternatively, it can help your reports narrow scope when you know something might be a bit far-fetched for your systems.
This requires staying in constant contact across various teams, managers and leaders, ICs, and being vigilant about staying up to date on feature releases.Know the Business
Might seem a lot like Knowing the Product, but it’s a bit more brass tacks than that. Understand where the company is in the midst of the competitive landscape, how the data and dollars are shaking out (what actually accounts for revenue?), and what the overall health of the business is.
This requires even more outreach and tab-keeping across the organization beyond Product and Technology
Why Design Leadership matters to ICs
Whether you’re interviewing at a new company, growing within one, or shaping a growing organization from within, it’s crucial to understand what good Design Leadership or management looks like. Ultimately, the kinds of responsibilities and opportunities listed above can inform:
your day-to-day work: for example, you might want to up the ball, proactively take on ownership of cross-departmental communication
your career trajectory: assessing the quality of your managers and leaders can help you understand the health of your organization; and you may want to make subsequent career decisions accordingly
When Leadership roles aren’t filled yet
Honestly, this is where things get exciting.
In rapidly scaling companies, it’s more likely than not that Design Leadership activities will be crowdsourced from the bottom up — when you know what leadership-level tasks need to get done, you and your team get them done.
And whether somebody gets promoted from within or hired from without to lead Design at your company, you get to have a say in who fills that role, or even which responsibilities are the biggest priority.
Understanding good leadership isn’t just about using it to get a manager title; it’s about making decisions for your own career. You can shape the future of your team and org to ultimately enable your best work.
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