“One does not simply walk into Mordor”: design leadership in large companies
Feedback is the one ring ruling them all.
Learn from my mistakes on the journey to Mount Doom. Effecting change at an experience design level in larger companies can be a challenge. But it can be extraordinarily rewarding as well. Here is a condensed version of the waypoints I have discovered along the way:
- Build allies and champions
- Address investment, funding, and other bad words
- Lead teams transparently
I’ve also worked at startups and smaller companies, and many of these principles still apply albeit at a different scale. Leading a sizable design fellowship means there is increased pressure on #2 and #3.
Get to know stakeholders and their intended outcomes.
Regardless if you arrive at a company with someone at the C-level or close to it already a design sponsor (happened to me exactly once at a Fortune 100), you must build relationships across the enterprise, developing allies and champions as your team’s supporters. These two stratums are not necessarily the same thing. Allies will back your investment asks and remember to include design in the process. Champions will insist design is part of the product process at the beginning, ensuring there is adequate funding and including design as a valued voice in the presentation of the product or project outcomes. You can find allies in unlikely places, like site reliability engineering (SRE) or a more common partnership such as the Brand team. It’s important to have open communication and develop a mutually successful relationship. However, champions are the dream. They’re the ones who advocate to include accessibility, content, and customer sentiment measures as well as design. They understand the necessity of experimentation and behaviorally validated design. Champions will participate in design reviews, and work directly with design in iterating and building solutions that humans can use and have been tested at scale. There will always be detractors, but time building allies and champions is far better spent and more professionally and personally rewarding.
However, this doesn’t mean you should ignore detractors. My favorite character in the Lord of the Rings is Éowyn, and as her king’s champion, she defeats the Lord of the Nazgûl because his assumption regarding her turned out to be completely wrong. A detractor can change their mind over time. So communication is crucial, and sharing your work, even to those who don’t support it, ensures the goals of inclusion are followed and practiced. Keep in mind that larger companies often have a lot of turnover, you never know when another leader may come in more amenable to a relationship and evidence that you stayed connected is powerful. There is also an opportunity to build relationships with other leaders in that organization, one person’s opinion or direction does not mean the entire team feels that way. I’m an introvert, and spending this time developing relationships is a stretch for me, but always rewarding. Similarly, for champions and allies, you should reinforce with them how important they are to you, your team, and the company’s larger goals. In some cases, champions can be garnered by helping them understand how to effectively integrate design into their bottom line objectives. Allies and champions are a great instrument for the institutionalization of design into larger enterprise goals.
Money gives you the freedom to create and fail.
These same allies and champions are crucial assets regarding funding. Many designers don’t realize that the more senior the managerial role, the more time spent chasing funding and accounting for delivery instead of design reviews, storytelling, and the design work we loved when we started down this path. But that funding frees your team to be makers and not just wireframe producers (level one in the design maturity model as per InVision) or meeting takers. Frankly, chasing design investment can be a wearying, soul-sucking task. And there are times when Gondor must call for aid. However, investment arguments are made quite a bit easier if the corporate methodology supports design. When a balanced team approach of engineering, product management and product design exists, design is institutionalized into the process itself. And are funded alongside those roles. Many current software methodologies nod to artifacts of design, but truly innovative product development includes not just design but discovery and framing, iteration, customer sentiment measures, and experimentation along with digital copywriting, and accessibility against shared foundations like design systems. Methodology reinforcement means you can use the same approach to funding as others, however, the myth of the full stack designer can get in the way. In typical balanced product teams, there is a group of engineers and one product manager, but thinking one designer, even in the best T-shaped model (popularized by IDEO CEO Tim Brown), can be an expert in every area (visual, taxonomy, usability, copywriting, etc) is unreasonable and unrealistic. That means you and your leadership (and design producers) must be able to articulate why additional help and investment is needed as well as show its value to the product or program.
In this context, understanding and speaking the language of the company is important. Is the company driven by data? Financials? Delivery? Patents? A combination of experience design metrics, operational metrics, and financial data can be ideal, as noted in McKinsey’s research on the value of design. Storytelling your team’s values and needs should reflect those priorities. Finding yourself in a powerpoint culture doesn’t mean the end of the world, but it does mean you have to divine how to communicate in that context (Nancy Duarte is a good example). Similarly, I’ve had to create operational overviews in the Amazon style (6 pages of copy with no pictures) which helped shape messaging around data-driven outcomes and funding needs. That type of collaboration helps you, your team, and your partners tell the larger funding narrative. In addition, it is important that you understand how elements of funding contributes to your entire team’s work, whether it is a part of a product team, center of excellence or some type of product capacity. This is arguably my least favorite part of my job, and I have made critical errors in roles where I did not understand the larger corporate financial goals as well as creative solutions available. Don’t be afraid to ask questions of not just financial folks, but your peers as well to ascertain how they figured out funding in different circumstances. Clearly documented (and revisited) key performance indicators (KPI), objectives and key results (OKR), or objectives, goals, strategy, and measures (OGSM), will help craft how the work aligns with the larger corporate strategy and has practical implications for how the team’s performance is measured. Design measures like customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) or customer effort score (CES) are not the only important aspect of working in a large corporate culture, modeling the way the rest of the teams create and measure their success reinforces trust and collaboration with the experience design practice. And gives your team the opportunity to fail as well as succeed. A culture of experimentation must support both, and that is the design world we all would like to live in. If your allies and champions can understand the value of failure, and what you may learn from it as well as that of success, you have built a partnership that supports your entire team.
Thoughtful Transparency matters to everyone.
Your team of leaders are also essential in the funding dance. They have relationships with their peers, and often work with them to build estimates. Leaders are the glue connecting the larger team and creating your design brand. For larger design organizations, your team of leaders set the tone for your entire squad. You can’t always get to know every individual on your team well and extended leadership’s time with team members is crucial. One of the difficult things here is ensuring you hire people that aren’t exactly like you. There is incredible value in a diverse team to give you insights you’d never consider and approaches that keep you connected to the humans on your team as well as those outside it. And those humans, like the external humans we serve, should be at the center of everything you do. One of the most positive changes I’ve seen in the practice is that human-centered design trumps the expert mindset. Experience design encompasses the end-to-end journey at the behest of the human, not despite it. For example, in the past only a small group of people (typically >50) participating in a usability study might determine design direction and delivery. Today, that approach just helps validate multiple viable solutions that can be tested at scale across thousands of people, programmatically putting into place the best human-vetted solution in a data-driven way. And anyone on the larger team should be able to see the results of those tests and work on outcomes in collaboration with you. For the humans on your global experience design team, such transparency is also essential for job growth and culture. Sharing and using clear job descriptions, career trajectories, and performance measures set the stage for everyone. However, when it comes to some larger corporate shifts, be mindful of transparency’s impacts. While it is important to communicate what is happening both on a larger level for the company as well as the relevant deliverables, if the information is something that your staff has no control or influence over, you should ask yourself what is your goal in sharing it? Introducing anxiety without a way to help or take action is incredibly debilitating to a team. I’m not advocating silence during tumultuous times (and there will be), but rather communicating vague information such as you think a product has been jettisoned and now we have to figure out where people are going to move doesn’t help your team. Of course asking people to problem solve or brainstorm with you can be meaningful, but if it’s a situation where you as a leader need to do some groundwork and learn your options, I believe waiting is a better course. Humans want to help, and sharing negativity without any options does your team no good. It’s a fine line, and asking for feedback regarding your approach is the best way to walk it. Acting on that feedback is just as important.
Feedback remains core in all three of these areas. As design continues to be institutionalized within the larger practice of software product development, feedback on its role in your corporate culture helps shape your larger strategy, goals, and vision for the design culture and practice you lead. Feedback from your team and leaders helps you course correct along the way. There is no magic sword, only recommendations for areas where I’ve learned the hard way to address early and often. I’ve worked with design leaders with a cult of personality, amazing skills, and wonderful insights that did not survive a larger corporate culture where networking, measures, and influence predicated the success of their team and its work. I’ve also worked with leaders who didn’t spend the time to articulate a vision or its measures to the larger team, and everyone was siloed to figure it out for themselves. It’s a dispiriting place to be. No leader is perfect, and it’s even harder to succeed with larger teams. This is where transparency can help build a successful design team. Keep in mind that you often inherit existing personnel who are unhappy with a shift in leadership, and I have found that it is rare you get to hire an entire team from scratch. Any humans working with you will have a basis of comparison for your leadership style. As leaders of a (hopefully) empathetic practice focused on human experience and journeys, you won’t always get it right and that’s okay. Not all cultures are a perfect fit for you as a leader, but taking the time to address these areas will give you a chance to deliver a great experience for your customers and your team while at the same time increasing the breadth of your personal leadership knowledge. Being transparent to your team and partners, giving them the financial freedom to create and succeed, and remaining open to feedback means you can shift your team’s course as well as your own to build a workplace you’d want to work and grow. It’s always a journey, and the amazing humans I’ve worked with across so many companies have made it worthwhile. I always wondered why Gandalf didn’t have Sam and Frodo ride the giant eagles to Mount Doom, but then there wouldn’t be a quest. There are decisions I would like to have changed in my own career, but my mistakes have taught me as much as the successes. I think Bilbo Baggins had it right when he asked: “Don’t adventures ever have an end? I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story.”
