The Design Manager’s role

We often talk about design management as a career path to grow into. It’s either management or individual contributor (IC) as the tracks to keep going forward on. I want to talk about something different, in that I’d like to discuss what the role of a design manager actually is. It seems that there’s no standard ways for a company to define this role, and that much of it comes down to personality and work styles. As a senior IC who has been managed by many design managers, I figured I’ve got a unique perspective for how the “Design Manager” role works and where organizations need to work to improve it.

In a typical startup with a small design team, the “Head of Design” is also the design manager for the handful of designers on the team (say six to ten IC designers). The manager is the one responsible for the quality of design output in the org as well as the personal career growth of the individual designers in the team. Between multiple 1-on-1s with the individual designers, tons of cross-team involvement as a design leader, and being heads down in hiring and growth planning, this “Head of Design” is often stretched way too thin. They’re not able to accomplish any one of these things well because they’re constantly being asked to do too much.

Overseeing a new product launch? The Head of Design is responsible for the ultimate design output. Dealing with an individual designer feeling stagnated for career growth? It’s the Head of Design’s problem to shape the career leader however they see fit. Had a designer leave and now you need to backfill their role? The Head of Design will manage hiring. Need to establish a design culture and team dynamics? It’s the Head of Design. See where the problem is? When they’re doing all these “other things”, they’re often not able to prioritize managing their own direct reports as well they could be. Organizations are already setting them up for failure here.

Bigger organizations seem to have this figured out a little better, but they still have issues. Let’s use my current role at Lyft as an example. The design role works as its own independent org, with a VP of Design operating at the same level as the VP of Product and VP of Engineering. Underneath that, there are many Director of Design roles in each line of business, and those Directors have Design Managers reporting to them. These Design Managers may have anywhere between two to six direct reports, all of whom are typically IC designers.

I’ve had the unique experience of having four different design managers at Lyft (officially three, but also counting the design manager who hired me and ended up leaving before I started). And each time, it’s been a different experience. One design manager was extremely involved in my day-to-day work and wanted to assist as much as possible with giving lots of design feedback. Another had so much going on that they were totally hands-off with my actual work and just asked me to loop them in whenever I needed their help in unblocking my work. Another was very into teambuilding workshops and exercises and wanted to define values and operational guidelines for the team as a whole. None of these things are bad, by the way. I’m just highlighting the prominent differences to showcase the diversity in styles that different design managers can choose to operate in.

This was wild to me. Every time my manager transitioned, it felt like my role and relationship to them completely shifted. In a way, this is expected. Everyone has different opinions and developed ways of working. Every manager will take what they’ve learned in their previous roles so far and apply it to the new team. This is fine, but there don’t seem to be any consistent operational guidance given from the organization about how the managers should be operating as “managers.” The only consistent definition of this at Lyft is that managers should be responsible for the career growth of their direct reports. This is a good guideline, but the same startup problem of being asked to do too much persists at larger orgs.

Overseeing the career growth of direct reports is not the design manager’s “sole job.” They’re also frequently dragged into cross-functional team planning sessions, added to goal setting meetings, being asked to run or organize design sprints and workshops, being put in charge of hiring and resourcing on teams, and are regularly being told to raise the bar for design quality and output across the team. Yet again, they’re being stretched too thin and are asked to do too much, even at larger organizations. And you can’t blame them for jumping in and wanting to do all of these things. There are lots of things in here that experienced designers with a lot of years in the industry are uniquely qualified to do. The IC direct reports of these managers typically want to be heads-down in their design work, so who else is going to run these design sprint workshops with the product leads?

Keep in mind that I’m writing all of this from the perspective of a senior IC designer being managed by design managers. I’ve never actually managed anyone as a Design Manager myself (I’ve unofficially mentored a lot of people though, which is different). I made the very conscious choice to go down the path of an IC designer, and when I see this vast array of differences in work styles and preferences in my design managers, I’m forced to ask myself whether many of them intentionally chose to be design managers or if they just sort of ended up in that role as a result of being told it’s the only option to grow into.

A lot of my design managers cared about my career growth. They would ask what parts of design excite me the most and would proactively try to put me on projects that emphasized those skills. Others did not ask or care at all and would only see their job as solving critical problems in the designer’s ability to execute on their work, which typically involved talking to some PM or Engineering Lead about problems in building the design as intended. Other design managers focused more on getting the design team to work together as one whole and frequently collaborate and communicate with one another, hoping that they provide enough of a built-in support system for designers within the organization that could scale without their help.

If you think about why this ends up happening, it’s in a way inevitable. Design Managers don’t see themselves succeeding in all of the different things that the company is asking of them, so they hone in on the few important things that they know will make the biggest impact on their team. Many prioritize the happiness and well-being of their designers, while many see their job as efficiently delegating priorities and projects across the team to meet business needs. As far as I can tell, hiring managers don’t have a specific metric that they can measure design management by, so a lot of it comes down to past work, experience, and work styles.

Is there a way to fix this problem? How do we even go about fixing it when many haven’t even acknowledged that the problem exists? Well, I’ve got one idea in mind, and it’s to split the “people” component of design management from the “design” component of it into two separate roles. Both roles technically “manage” the IC designer, but in different ways.

One role is the “Organizational Design Manager,” who is focused on processes and people. They’re the ones who are responsible for how the team works, how the team communicates, and handle any HR or hiring needs on the team. They establish guidelines for best practices in working cross-functionally, they run workshops and plan brainstorming sessions, and they help form teams to set them up for success.

The other role is the “Skills Design Manager,” who is responsible for the design quality and career growth of the direct reports. They are focused on ensuring that there’s a high quality bar on all design work and are deeply involved in the actual day-to-day work of the direct reports. They frequently have conversations with their IC designers about what parts of design excite them the most and where they’d like to grow.

And remember all the IC designers on the team would have two managers — one Organizational Design Manager and one Skills Design Manager. They would have separate 1-on-1’s with each of them (alternating every week). They get to focus on personal growth and design work with the Skills Design Manager, whereas they talk about team dynamics and processes with the Organizational Design Manager. They need to have open lines of communication with both of them.

These two design manager roles both need to be in constant lockstep with each other, i.e., this system won’t work if the two roles never talk to each other. They need to meet and discuss goals, strategy, priorities, and objectives 2-3 times a week. The Skills Design Manager will bring to the table what they’ve learned about what the IC designers want to improve and learn, and the Organizational Design Manager will design the team’s workflows and processes around it. The Organizational Design Manager will propose new ways of working to meet business or market demands, and the Skills Design Manager will try to adapt the skillsets and strengths of the individual designers into the new system in the best possible way.

The interesting part about this model is that the Organizational Design Manager doesn’t actually need to have worked as a designer in the past. Sure, it’s helpful if they have, but their role involves more of a project manager or a program manager skillset than a typical design role. The Skills Design Manager is ideally someone who has worked for several years as an IC designer and has a good understanding of all the nuances of specializing in various aspects of design.

We actually currently have a similar-ish model at Lyft, where there’s a Design Manager and a Design Program Manager on every team, but only the Design Manager is considered the actual “manager” of the IC designer. The Design Program Manager is mostly concerned with ensuring that all the different design disciplines (UX Research, UX Writing, Product Design) are talking to each other and collaborating as efficiently as possible, so they’re technically not doing everything that I’m proposing the Organizational Design Manager would be doing in my model. Plus, the role of the regular Design Manager at Lyft is so dynamic and variable that they sometimes fit into the mold of my proposed Skills Design Manager but are also sometimes better suited to be the Organizational Design Manager. It’s a toss-up due to all the different types of people and personalities out there.

I know it’s a lot to ask organizations to adopt a model of having two managers for an IC designer, so I don’t really have any hopes of this model actually being put into practice, but this is literally the only thing that makes sense to be as an IC designer being managed by a design manager. There are too many managers with too many varying skillsets out there to put all the burden of planning, organizing, overseeing the career growth of their direct reports, being put in-charge of hiring and resourcing, and running team-wide design activities all at once. The best thing to do is to separate the role of the Design Manager into two distinctly different roles with unique skillsets and strengths. That way, we’re not overburdening and overworking design managers into the ground and burning them out by putting too much on their plate, while also ensuring that their IC designers have two managers that they can lean on for different things as they navigate the already complex landscape of growing as a designer.