When I became a design manager a few months ago, I felt a bit overwhelmed. I was so excited and grateful for the opportunity, and frankly, I was worried I was going to mess something up. There were so many things to keep my eye on, it felt like my attention was being pulled in a hundred different directions.

To keep things manageable, I created a short framework outlining all the things I thought a design manager should do (at least as far as I’ve encountered from past managers, books, etc). The framework was meant to be a map of all the things I could be doing with my time to help me be clear about my areas of responsibility, be proactive rather than reactive, and to generally keep a broader perspective and not over-index on any one thing.

Over the last few months, I’ve found it enormously comforting having a map of my responsibilities laid out like this, and so wanted to share it in case it can be useful to you as well. It’s changed and evolved as I’ve learned more on the job, and I expect it to continue to grow and evolve as I continue to learn and get more experience. Speaking of which, if you read this and think something’s missing, I’d love to hear from you.

At a high level, the way I’ve come to think about being design manager is pretty simple, and consists of two major components:

Cultivate the team

Ensuring the people on your team are well supported, feel like they belong, have purpose, are growing, can take risks, and generally feel happy and motivated.

Enable high quality work

Once they’re motivated, create processes, partnerships, and systems that let them do great work with as little friction as possible.

Cultivate the team

To get people to want to join your team, stay on your team, and do great work while on your team, it’s critical to create an environment where people feel safe, valued, purposeful, and motivated. The key areas for me are:

• Hire the right people
• Create community and belonging
• Enable personal growth
• Spotlight purpose and impact

Hire the right people

You’re responsible for adding to the team through hiring. I don’t think you need to hear why hiring is critical, but suffice to say it’s important to hire good people who will help cultivate the culture you’re trying to create. Key responsibilities include…

• Accurately predict capacity needs and advocate for appropriate headcount
• Assemble a team with diverse perspectives, experiences, and talents
• Determine the interview process
• Manage the hiring process and screen candidates
• Prepare your team to effectively interview candidates
• Make final hiring decisions
• Onboard new team members and ensure they feel welcomed and supported as they ramp up

Quick clarification before we go further: When I say “You’re responsible for…” in this post, it does not always mean you do all the work or make executive decisions. It means making sure it happens, and more often than not involves letting go of direct control.

Create community and belonging

You’re also responsible for ensuring people feel safe, included, and able to be vulnerable, and respect one another. Here’s the way I break it down:

• Create an inclusive team environment
• Support team members’ well being
• Plan off-sites and social events
• Ensure psychological safety and a sense of belonging
• Monitor and address team morale
• Encourage thoughtful risk taking and innovation
• Celebrate successes and achievements
• Address interpersonal issues and support conflict resolution
• Listen to thoughts, ideas, and concerns from team and peers

Enable personal growth

Helping members of your team grow is often highly important to their happiness (and great for the organization as they continue to level up!). This both occurs from the company’s perspective on what good performance is, and from each individual’s perspective on their own personal career goals and how they want to grow. Focus areas:

• Communicate clear performance expectations on what ‘Meeting Expectations’ means and what ‘Exceeding Expectations’ means for their role and level
• Conduct regular company performance reviews
• Support setting and working toward professional development goals with regular checkins and planning sessions
• Create learning opportunities
• Provide coaching & real-time feedback

Spotlight purpose and impact

Last but not least, its your responsibility to cultivate a sense of purpose and meaning. Why does this work matter? What impact does it have? Key responsibilities include…

• Help members of your team connect with purpose behind the work that’s meaningful to them
• Convey a compelling vision that the team can rally behind
• Showcase the impact of work the team did

Enable high quality work

We just went over a very high level look at creating your team and keeping them happy, psychologically safe, and motivated. If your team isn’t feeling that way, that’s where to focus. This next section generally won’t do much good if people don’t feel safe to be themselves, are unmotivated, etc*. But, assuming that’s going reasonably well, the next big thing to think about is how to enable your team to do the best work possible with as little friction as possible. Here’s the areas where you can focus:

• Align on vision and strategy
• Advocate for the team’s needs
• Create shared context
• Ensure quality design practices
• Staff projects and teams
• Support project work

*This is somewhat of an oversimplification since organizations are complex and all the items in this framework are deeply interrelated. For instance, you might need to address creating a clearer vision in order to help improve motivation.

Align on vision and strategy

As a design manager, you’re now responsible for ensuring you and your team are aligned behind the vision and strategy of your organization and have a clear understanding of where you fit it. This not only involves ensuring everyone understands important strategic decisions and the reasoning behind them (even if you may disagree), but also involves ensuring your team has a voice in those decisions, particularly with respect to representing the voice of the user. Last, as a design leader you also have the opportunity to play a big role in how the vision for your organization (particularly from the user’s perspective), is articulated within your organization. Summing up these responsibilities:

• Help inform and create the company vision and strategy and advocate for the user’s perspective
• Ensure the whole team’s voice is heard during the formation of the vision & strategy
• Ensure the team understands the vision and strategy once finalized and that they have the opportunity to probe and ask questions
• Own the artifacts articulating the vision from the user’s perspective

Advocate for the team’s needs

Team advocacy is all about ensuring your team has what they need to succeed from the broader organization. It might involve process changes, requesting more budget or headcount, or requesting more guidance from leadership. Creating strong partnerships across the organization is critical for successful team advocacy. I sum this up with:

• Create strong cross-functional partnerships and lines of communication to ensure everyone has what they need
• Advocate team needs, pain points and expectations to cross-functional peers and leadership
• Advocate for and build effective cross functional processes to help everyone succeed

Create shared context

It’s also your responsibility now to ensure your team has the information they need to be successful; from adding additional context to announcements to creating more cross team visibility. Key things I focus on:

• Ensure clarity around key information and decisions from company and leadership and provide additional context and rationale
• Create visibility into work and decisions happening in other areas of the organization that may be relevant
• Make space for questions from the team regularly
• Create as much transparency as possible
• Candidly communicate relevant information, even if it’s bad news

Ensure quality design practices

You’re also responsible for the overall quality of work from your team. Since you’re probably not directly responsible for executing the work anymore (at least as much), this means creating systems that encourage and support good user centered design practices. These systems should ideally be self sustaining, so you don’t need to continue to spend time maintaining them once they’re in place. Things I aim to think about:

• Ensure the organization has an appropriate understanding of your users, their goals, pain points, and behaviors
• Create a culture of user driven decision making that informs strategy, vision, feature prioritization, and design decisions
• Agree on key principles and expectations around user experience within the organization
• Create regular moments of divergence and creativity
• Create regular moments for critique and productive debate over design decisions
• Ensure processes and expectations are in place for appropriate stakeholder alignment
• Partner with engineering to ensure the team has a scalable, flexible design system

Staff projects and teams

Getting a little more tactical, you are now the one largely making decisions about what work each team member focuses on. To do this effectively, you need to have an intimate knowledge of each team members strengths, development areas, work relationships, and goals. Areas I try to think about:

• Match team member interests, development goals, and skills with work opportunities and company priorities
• Create opportunities for stretch assignments for those interested
• Balance opportunities across team members
• Ensure team members are set up for success on projects given their current skill level
• Ensure workloads are balanced and reasonable

Support project work

Last but not least, you need to ensure everyone on your team is supported throughout their projects. I try not to get too involved, but want to stay aware of whats going on to get ahead of anything that looks like it might go sideways, help unblock people and make connections, gain a better understanding of how people on my team work, and look for future improvements we might make to our processes. Responsibilities:

• Maintain awareness of ongoing projects and their statuses
• Address escalations, blockers, or other issues
• Highlight useful cross-functional or cross team connection points
• Thought partner and be willing to jump in and help out (but don’t micro-manage).
• Provide feedback on work or craft at appropriate times

Putting it all together

I put together a diagram summarizing everything I covered in this post. Feel free to download it here if you find it useful!

That’s it!

Thanks for reading, if you’re interested in digging into this topic more, I’ve linked a few addition resources below.