As Richard Branson is enjoying his space journey with 5 other members of his crew I am sitting here, thinking how many great minds had worked on this behind the scene to make this journey possible…

… and envying that amazing feeling of achievements the goal together with your team. Yeah, what a feeling!

A true example of a team effort, brought up by a mix of a dedicated team and an inspiring leader upfront.

Being a Design Lead I’ve started reflexing on how good is my approach to building a successful design team that would create the Next Big Thing.

As a true Designer, I am doing my research first, looking at what big minds have to say about their approach.

First, whose vision catches my eyes and is close to mine was Amanda Linden, a Director of Product Design at Facebook,and her article How I Build Effective Design Teams.

She points as more and more companies “prioritize design”, leaders are facing the necessity and opportunity to hire big and quickly. She is often asked the following questions about the team structuring:

• What types of designers do you hire?
• How do you get CEO approval to build the team you want — especially a large one, or one with design specialists?
• How do you divide roles and responsibilities among designers and managers?
• How do you get teams like engineering and marketing on board with the design team’s vision and efforts?

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As a Design Leader, you may be asked similar questions or a bit different ones, but the uncertainties behind them are pretty the same. So, Amanda shares her vision on “five tactics I’ve used to build effective design teams”.

It goes without saying that Amanda describes the model at organizations she has worked at, like Asana and Intuit, and these organizations have had their specifics. For sure, this can’t be applied everywhere, but many many points from the article resonate with my vision. Very briefly, they are:

1. Design your ideal team, and get approval on your hiring plan

2. Distribute responsibility

3. Create a well-defined brand

4. Make sure your engineers sweat the details

5. Enable design thinking across the company

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Amanda Linden

One thought I find especially important when it comes to building the design culture at the organization:

“As a design leader, I spend much more of my time fostering design thinking outside of the design team than I do within my own team. Designers already get it.

But you can teach other people in the company how to work with the design team and how to think like designers.” ©

I do not know what industry leaders you are following to learn more about best practices used, but I highly recommend investing a little of your time to learn the details from Amanda Linden.

The second stop in my research is Spotify. The design culture cultivated at the company is the one I have been admiring and observing for years now like many other designers.

Nicole Burrow, aDesign Director for the Consumer Experience, in her piece Making the Band: Building Exceptional Design Teams at Spotifyexplains how building great teams is similar to starting a great band:

“the challenge of making a great design team is similar to the challenge of making a great band”

©Nicole Burrow

Nicole also mentions an extract from

Everyone who has ever led a team would agree how important it is to build this unison feeling inside your team. Nicole suggests ones everyone is in the right roles the magic begins to happen, she calls it “playing the right instrument”, but the process to getting there is not obvious for everybody.

As designers progress in their career they have to decide which avenue they want to go: an individual contributor or a manager. There is a Y-shaped career framework at Spotify described by Nicole that explains very well how both options are developed. If you’ve ever been struggling with the design titles or the nature of an IC or a manager, it is the piece that will help you.

Nicole shares her experience about building the culture of the team, how to successfully fine-tune the team as well as preventing its burnout. These 2 takeaways have caught my eye the most.

1. Once the design squad's structure has been changed and restructures into a small design hub it’s resulted in “immediately more creativity and collaboration coming from the team. And most importantly, the work got a lot better” ©Nicole Burrow
2. Did you that according to the research by Jobvite 29% of turnover happens during the first 90 days of employment? A good onboarding process can increase retention by up to 82% according to Glassdoor.

I can only add here that both articles were published before the pandemic and current approaches of a Design Leader have been affected by it to a certain degree. Here is another reading from Spotify Growing a Distributed Product Design TeambySofia Salazarand Pilar Serna that is more relevant to the post-COVID activity and can be interesting to you.

My experience of 12+ years in design and leadership tells me that whatever organization or team you are building there can be differences as well as similarities of approaches.

Let’s make some benchmarking for a startup, an established product company and a design-oriented agency against defined metrics:

1. The size and place of the design team
2. The structure and expertise
3. The autonomy and responsibility

The size place of the design team at the company

Startup:

Normally a startup has a very horizontal and flexible hierarchy with a cross-functional team model combining designers, product managers & developers. The design team itself is very well challenged by launching fast and early.

It can be 5–10 designers working closely with other team members on the company goals. Processes are under development.

Product:

A well-structured company with established hierarchy and expertise areas. The design teams are inlined with development teams and product managers. Several design leads run design teams focused on different product goals.

There can be a few design teams working on their own tracks or one big design hub with different areas of expertise. Processes are already established with continuous improvements.

Agency:

Design-oriented agencies are working for external customers providing a range of design expertise. Every design team is unique as its place and value to the company and its place there can differ dramatically.

The design team at the agency can be really big depending on the agency itself. Let’s keep in mind 100 people. Normally these designers are working in different practice units or simply Practises with different clients, having different skills and delivering different services. Here you can find a team of illustrators, for example.

This research snapshot from Nielsen Norman Group shows the corelation of the size of the design team to the size of organisation.

The structure and expertise

Startup:

At this stage of the business, the designers who are jack of all trades may be required. Generalists in areas of the UI/UX spectrum are great assets to run the product design development. I would hire product designers who are good in research, UX practices as well as UI practices, work with developers, and have built products from scratch.

Product:

As processes are already set at product, the design teams are normally well-structured and set with their own LEGO unit. Each team can include a few Product designers, UX Researches, possibly UI engineers or UX copywriters. Here you can also find people of different expertise with really deep knowledge of a few close subjects, like Animation, Interactive Design or Video.

The experience level of the designers there is presented with a clear hierarchy of Junior, Mid, Senior, Lead Designer, or Manager.

Agency:

The agency is an organism where every system is working independently but each organ in these systems ideally should be easily interchangeable. Having this metaphor in mind you’ll typically find design teams with similar structures or teams with a specific area of expertise.

That’s where such role as DesignOps is crucial and topic like Skills Matrix or Skills Mapping, if built correctly, is especially beneficial.

The proposed matrix is on how it could look like according to Nielsen Norman Group.

The autonomy and responsibility

Startup:

The design team typically reports to the VP of Products or CPO. Designers are free to choose the toolset and methodologies, as well as set up the process to build future design culture.

The design team operates within the Product unit.

Product:

The design team can have several ranks of titles as well as career paths: IC or manager. The tools designers are using can be already established with a possibility to improve but not as easily as at startup. Head of Design has mostly managing responsibility rather than hands-on activity.

Here the design team can operate whether inside the Product unit or independent design department in connection with product managers and engineers.

Agency:

Similar to the structure the agency type can be very independent about what and how the teams are working. Although the process of functioning is regulated by common rules every team is following.

The reporting here depends on the agency model as well as the clients and projects it is working on.

Below is the snapshot from Nielsen Norman Group presenting the research about design reporting in modern organizations.

Please keep in mind that there is no magic recipe “how to build and develop effective design teams” exists but practice makes perfect and every new team you are going to build or lead will require a slightly different approach, your empathy, and flexibility as a manager as well as a human being.

…but once you are there together you will rock!