The Clearleft Podcast

This is the Clearleft podcast.

Clearleft is a design agency, but alongside our client work, we also run events. One of those events is UX London. It’s been going since 2009. After the first few years of running UX London, we noticed an interesting trend. Talking to attendees in the hallway or at the after-party, we kept hearing the same story. It went something like this:

“Help! I’ve been promoted into leading a design team, and I have no idea what I’m doing!”

This situation was so widespread that we ended up starting a whole new event called Leading Design. It’s been running since 2016. We invited the best and brightest design leaders to come and share their stories.

And, you know what? Their stories sounded very familiar.

I started as a designer, an individual contributor, like many of you, and as I got increasing responsibilities, I moved into manager roles. And as the frog boiled, oh so slowly into leadership roles.

Do you ever look at your calendar and just want to cry? And you’re like, ah, what happened to those days when I was like just sitting in front of my computer designing and it was so nice and it was so cute and it was just me and my colors and my fonts, and I was like making stuff and making users happy and now I never get to do that anymore. Do any of you ever feel like that?

You get promoted because you were good at one job. Now prepare to suck at a completely different job.

My journey was kind of an unusual one. It makes for a very funny story now, it really wasn’t easy and it was super messy.

I sucked massively, lots of little mistakes; things I didn’t realize initially. And also, it was just this real emotional rollercoaster because part of going into leadership is the emotional change and the emotional process that you go through.

I used to spend a lot more time, like thinking about the process and the craft and like the time and like, nope, that’s gone. That’s just not how it works anymore.

You can be a manager. Where your craft is growing and leading people, or you can be an individual contributor where you get deeper and stronger at your craft.

That was Jane Austin, Hannah Donovan and Margaret Lee. What they described does seem to be the generally accepted path to design leadership. You start as a practitioner and then you become a leader or a manager. But a good designer isn’t necessarily going to be a good manager, right?

I mean, suppose you’re on a design team. Who would you rather have leading your team? Someone who’s great at design, but not so good at managing? Or someone who’s not necessarily a great designer, but is an excellent manager?

I know it’s like asking if you’d rather fight one horse sized duck or 100 duck sized horses.

But you get the idea, right? Isn’t there a point where design leadership ceases to be about design and is entirely about leadership?

My friend Mark Boulton tweeted recently:

I see so many of my design peers getting chewed up and spun around in the machinery of large organizations, shuffling from one meeting to the next, telling themselves that design leadership is scaling design teams, org charts, managing the CEO. Where is the design in any of that?

At Clearleft we have regular design discussions on the topics of the day. And I threw Mark’s quote into the mix one day to see what my colleagues thought.

Here’s a snippet from that conversation featuring Clearlefies Chris How, Jon Aizlewood, and Andy Thornton.

A lot of designers do struggle to move into leadership because I don’t think as a discipline it’s necessarily a people focused thing. When you go into design leadership, you are designing culture, and you’re designing a different level of things.

I’m experiencing that personally because part of me thinks I really miss design like, I really miss getting stuck into the design side of things. Sometimes I feel that discomfort, like no joke. I really, really miss that aspect of like I would love to be back in UI.

If you’re just thinking about UI design and looking over a designer’s shoulder, and you think that’s your role as a design manager, then I think you’ve genuinely got the wrong idea, actually.

A head of engineering, you wouldn’t necessarily expect to get a pair of pliers out and solder stuff together, but you would expect them to have an understanding of the engineering process. The design leader, you would expect to have an understanding of design and how that team flourishes. And that probably is easier if you have come from a practitioner background, but not necessarily so.

You can be a head teacher in a school and not have been a classroom teacher. Saying that, you have an immediate friction with teachers going, but you don’t understand my world. And I think the same would be true of designers. It’s like, you’re making these decisions, but you don’t actually know what it’s like to do the UI work, to run a workshop, et cetera, et cetera.

The meta problem here is like in any career path, at some point you stick with the individual contributor thing or you go into management. If you shift into management, it depends how much management skills you’ve built in your individual contributor path to that date as to how well you’ll take that shift. I can’t see any other way.

I think people assume that you can use what you’ve done, graft with your hands for so long and then move into management and it’s basically just an extension of that same thing. And it’s so absolutely not, right? You’re woefully under-prepared, you have no idea what to expect and yeah, you absolutely need a completely different set of skills and soft skills, hard skills, everything else that you just simply often didn’t and wouldn’t know just being a practitioner, right?

Presumably as a design leader, you’re still, and again, this is the broadest definition of design, right, you’re still designing a way to make design better at that organization. So you’re designing the right processes, designing the right interactions with people, you’re designing the culture. You can design people and you can design organizations.

It’s very meta now, right? Everything’s much more meta. We’re now designing processes, flows effectively, like a company’s direction and growth that is still design at its atomic level, but it’s not the design that we know, and we grew up with it with in our career. Totally different.

Certainly UI design is worlds apart from people management.

I think one of the constant challenges with design is the perception of design in companies and design is in many companies seen as the polish of the end of the process. And the design leadership challenge is to shift left in the double diamond to eventually become the incubator of ideas and, and be absolutely integral in that.

A lot of this is just basically becoming better at business in general, whether or not your design heritage is important or not. You know, that constant cliché of like design has a seat at the table but it’s true. And at that stage I wonder if it’s anything to do with design whatsoever. It’s just more business related.

I’m going to interrupt play at this point to hand out a yellow card for clichés: design having a seat at the table.

But now that the cliché has been spoken aloud, let me bring in some other voices here from a recent panel discussion on design leadership featuring Jean Laleuf and Lola Oyelayo-Pearson.

We need to shake off the idea that we need to keep fighting for our seat at the table because I think we have somehow created a set of behaviors that aren’t conducive to our participation in the business context. So we ourselves need to stop trying to prove ourselves by creating more artifacts and things and maybe do it by just being more interested and invested in the product outcomes and finding different ways to engage.

Sometimes what we forget as designers is that we need to be speaking the language of the people that we’re talking to. And sometimes we wind up excluding ourselves by making ourselves look too special and that there’s a degree of effort that we need to make as designers to speak the speak; start at the level that our collaborators are at. And the other thing is we need to make sure to be aware of the commercial needs of the businesses that we’re serving, right? We can’t just do design for the sake of design We’re being hired to get a commercial outcome and we need to deliver and contribute. Otherwise there’s no point and there is no reason for us to have a seat at the table.

Another way to think of this is simply “If I was the CEO of this company, what would I be doing right now?”

Just take a minute to think about that. Think about like yesterday, when you were at work and think about some of the problems you had and just think about like, if I was the CEO of this company, what would I be doing about them? It’s a wonderful exercise.

I get the necessity of designers needing to speak the language of business. But. I worry. It seems that as an individual contributor, your viewpoint is focused on the end user. But as you climb the ladder into management and leadership, your viewpoint is focused on the business.

I know, I know there’s always gotta be a balance between what’s desirable and what’s feasible.

I just wonder if design leaders might lose sight of that over time.

I wanted to sit down with someone who consciously decided to make the change from being a designer to being a design leader. So I spoke to Temi Adeniyi.

I’m Temi and I am a design leader.

Temi started out in the agency world.

I loved being in an agency doing that whole agency life, where there were different clients and it was fast paced and so on. I think as well that it was a good place for me to get my start. The agency that I joined was pretty small. So for me it was great because I got to be involved in so many different things. I really kind of, had this, like, wide breadth of things I was able to do, that I don’t think I would have necessarily have found myself doing if I had jumped straight into working as an in-house designer. And I think I also wouldn’t have been able to do these things if I had been working for a huge agency. So I think it was actually kind of the perfect fit for me at that time.

So when did things start to change?

I would design these things and wonder, okay, but if this thing I designed is out there in the wild, how did it actually perform? How was that perceived? Did people have difficulties using this? Did they enjoy using it? Were they able to make a purchase? So yeah, I had zero clue and nobody could tell me either.

I think I just got to this point where I was quite frustrated that everything seemed to stop with client sign off. I just felt a huge disconnect between the things that I was designing for and who I was kind of designing them for ultimately.

A lot of really exciting design was emerging from product companies who had, of course, in-house teams. So I think my perception was starting to change as well as what I was wanting to focus on as a designer. I think my own values and approach to design was also kind of shifting at that time.

So all of these things intersected, and it just so happened that I was looking for a new job. And from there I ended up I think, on this journey of deciding what did I want? Did I want to go back to working in an agency, maybe a bigger one? Or did I want to work in a, like a more corporate in-house team? Or did I want to see what it would be like in a startup? I think deciding to go and work in a startup actually led me to moving out here to Berlin.

I asked Temi if this was also a change in scale to working in a bigger team.

Funnily enough, the company was bigger, but the design team was smaller. So at this agency, I think we were a team of about, I want to say about maybe 10, 10 or so designers. But when I moved over, the team there was like pretty small design team. So we were just three designers, I want to say. Yes, we were just three designers.

Temi started making plans for the next stage of her career, becoming a design leader.

I want to be a leader at the next place that I joined. I want to build up the team. And I was happy with, of course, that taking its time and it being a bit more organic, but I put my ambitions out there and they were very well received. To over time, build the team, lead the team and develop my leadership skills.

When I joined, I think for, I guess for a few weeks, it was just myself. There was an intern there that had been hired initially and when she left, that was when I got the opportunity to really hire someone for the team and that person at the time, it was just like another intern to replace the one who had left. But actually she’s still on the team and it’s been awesome to watch her growth because these days she’s leading her own team. So that’s been a fun journey just over the five years that I was there.

It definitely happened gradually. But I think it was very nice because I was able to take the time to build the team, obviously still going at the pace that the company needed me to,, in terms of having like designers on the team to support with the work and so on. But it wasn’t just like, okay, here’s everything immediately chucked at me. So starting with one intern and then having the senior designer join and then from there on continuing to grow a team and to double it and so on.

So at what point did Temi know that she was no longer an individual contributor?

There was a designer who was hired and I knew that, okay, when this designer joins the team, that means that they will basically replace me in some of the hands-on work or basically all of the hands on work that I was still having to do at that time.

And for me that was, it was kind of bittersweet. On the one hand I felt a lot of relief because I was just doing so much. I was doing this hands-on work. I was growing and leading the team in terms of mentorship, one-on-ones, putting out fires, all these kinds of things. But also trying to get more involved in the more strategic areas of leadership and the business side of the company. And it was just really, really difficult to do that when I still had to, for example, take part in scrum rituals.

For me letting go of control in that aspect was difficult because I think it clearly marked a point in my career where it’s like, I’m no longer a hybrid. I’m no longer hands-on in design. This is a part of my identity as a designer that stops here. So I think that was a difficult bit for me just realizing that, okay, I won’t be doing any hands-on work from here on. And the switch will just be fully focusing on leadership. So that was a tricky bit .

I knew that I did not want to be the kind of leader who was looking over people’s shoulders or second guessing someone’s work. I think from day one, that’s just never been my approach.

It seems like there’s almost an inevitability to designers becoming design leaders. But what about designers who don’t want to go down that path?

I would say it’s not until quite recently that I’ve been seeing more discussions about the different paths that a design career can take. I would say a couple of years ago, this discussion really wasn’t a thing. Back then it was quite logical or maybe it was just inevitable rather that a senior designer would end up going into to management like leadership and so on, because that’s where you kind of had to go if you wanted more influence, if you wanted more scope, like if you wanted more money, et cetera. So I think for a while, it seemed there that was a bit of a cutoff point in terms of how senior someone could go.

Maybe this is only true for product design, but there did seem to be that sort of end point. I think what’s really awesome now is there are more discussions about this. There are more discussions about what does it look like for someone to be principal designer or someone to be like a staff designer and what does it look even beyond that? How can someone who just wants to focus just purely on craft really deepen their expertise and their career on that specific track?

I personally feel like we’re still in our infancy when it comes to these kind of discussions and actually quite practically laying out for people, “Here’s what it might look like for you. Here are examples of people who have chosen this path.”

I think, there aren’t many examples today when it comes to this compared to someone stepping up on the management or like leadership track. I think there are plenty of examples of what it looks like for a senior designer to go into, to management, but not so much for a senior designer to go way beyond just seniority and into being a principal and going even further.

This is something that Jane Austin has spoken about at leading design. She shared a useful exercise for anyone who finds themselves at the crossroads.

When I’ve been mentoring more junior designers and trying to help them decide which path they want to go on, I use this activity to help them work out what they want to do, and it’s called heart, tree, and star.

So if you look at things through the lens of the heart, if you look at your career through the lens of the heart, you think about what you love, what gives you flow, you know, what makes your day-to-day role fun, exciting, and the time pass really quickly. Or what makes you happy and gives you satisfaction.

And the tree areas; are there areas where you want to grow professionally or personally or both? So these are talents that you want to acquire or existing gifts you have that you want to develop to an expert level.

And then finally the star, this is the ways that you want to be rewarded either in private or public. Sometimes it’s the satisfaction of a job well done or trying to change the world. Sometimes it’s just lots of money. That’s absolutely okay.

And a sort of combination of these are absolutely fine to add to the list. So you’ve gone through this process and you think, okay. Yeah, I really do want to move into leadership.

What do you do? Well, how do you make this step?

Temi’s heart, tree, and star pointed towards design leadership. I asked her if the move was scary or lonely.

I think with the first few years I was definitely really simply figuring it out as I went along. And there was a point where it was really difficult to just try and like, continually have this baptism by fire, because a lot of things for me early on were just super new. So at that point I actually started to get design leadership coaching and that was immensely helpful.

I was also fortunate enough to be connected to some other design leaders around that time. And it was really, really useful just to swap stories and just talk some things through and see how things played out in other companies. I think there’s something really comforting in finding out okay, that issue that you think is completely unique to you or to your team is not particularly unique at all. So these things were really helpful.

And I think most recently, and this is not a plug, but joining them Leading Design Slack group has also been incredibly useful for me as well because there are so many people in there. Just being able to actually just simply search archives, it’s just a very accessible resource.

So I think these things, continuing to speak to other design leaders and so on, these things help in the end.

If you’re on the design leadership journey, head on over to leadingdesign.com. Even if you’re not a design leader there are still valuable lessons there.

Even if you don’t already lead a team, I do think that it’s important to think of yourself as a leader. And this was one of the mistakes that I was making when I was a baby designer and then a baby design manager is that I wasn’t necessarily thinking of leading myself.

I thought that someone else was going to do it for me. I thought that my CEO was going to help lead us all to success. I wasn’t thinking about that it was my job to think about what the business needed to lead myself to success. And that mindset is the mindset of a leader, which is to really focus on what matters and the thing that matters is the thing that has impact.

What does make a great design leader? It really just comes down to positive user impact.

Leading design is online this year. It’s a month long festival happening in March.

Temi will be giving a talk called Design Leadership For Imposters, which sounds like it’s going to be great. And there’s a whole load of other great speakers lined up.

There might still be some tickets available for the conference portion. If you hurry.

That’s leadingdesign.com.

But if your heart, tree, and star are pointing towards the individual contributor path, then you should attend UX Fest in June. It’s also online. It’s also a month long featuring talks, masterclasses and more.

Go to UXlondon.com.

Thanks for listening.