Image by Unsplash

The myth says that a rockstar designer is the best of the best. This person is great in design and can do amazing things that average designers cannot achieve. It’s not hard to understand why so many organizations love the idea of having rockstar designers on board. They see rockstars as a solution to many problems they have. They hire the best of the best and expect excellent outcomes, but this person doesn’t make things better.

In this article, I want to discuss who a rockstar designer is, why hiring a rockstar designer rarely helps a company achieve a new level of design maturity, and what the company should do instead.

Who is a rockstar designer

The term ‘rockstar designer’ describes a designer who is part of the design elite. This person demonstrates exemplary design skills and productivity (rumors say they are 5x or 10x more productive than the average designer).

When we try to look closer at rockstar designers, we notice that all rockstar designers have two things in common:

• Impressive portfolio. A list of the projects and companies they’ve worked on can impress anyone.
• They are popular in the design community. They’re loud enough, so people notice them.

Why is hiring a rockstar designer rarely help a company

Many people argue that ‘rockstar designer’ is a myth. Personally, I don’t think so. It is true that some people are more gifted and driven than others. The real myth is that having a rockstar in a team will help an organization improve its design process.

In reality, it’s not a given that adding a person to the team who is remarkably good in design will help the team to achieve more. And here are a few problems that hiring rockstars can cause:

It can demotivate the team

Team members might assume that the new person will join and become their teacher — someone who will tell them how they should do their work. For the same reason, rockstar designers can face a lot of resistance from the team. If the rockstar designer doesn’t have strong authority within a team, people will simply ignore them. But even with good authority skills, rockstars can experience resistance during the first month of their work in the new place (until they build a bond with a team).

It sets an unreasonable expectation for regular designers

Regular designers will evaluate their skills according to the skills that rockstar has. They might think that the only way to be successful in this company is to be like this guy.

A success that rockstar designer portrait might not be transferable from one organization to another

Rockstar designers can demonstrate exemplary results in one company, but their results become less impressive as soon as they join another company. It happens because designers rarely work in a vacuum. Products are created by teams, and a rockstar designer is a part of the team. When a rockstar designer moves to another team, their performance can suffer because they will work with different people and follow a different process.

Rockstars have limited or no impact on design culture in organization

Companies try to hire rockstar designers because they think that rockstar designers will make complex problems disappear. They believe a person will come and improve the design culture in their organization. That rarely happens in practice. An organization’s level of design maturity is directly relevant to how managers understand and value design. Pretty good designers can easily demonstrate poor results in an organization that doesn’t value design.

One rockstar designer, even with impressive soft skills, cannot replace a team of regular ones

Design is a team sport, and the performance of one team player doesn’t have much impact on the team’s results. For example, if we compare design to football, we will see that when you hire the best forward in the world, but the team goalkeeping sucks, the team will never achieve impressive results.

It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t hire rockstar designers. You should. But before that, you need to consider two things:

• Designer’s personality and leadership skills. If you want to improve your team spirit, you should avoid rockstars that prefer to work in isolation. The last thing you want is to hire an anti-social person who will ask other people to stay out of their way while they do their work. Rockstars should also have solid mentorship skills — they should be able to teach their ‘rockstarness’ to others.
• Your environment. It’s not fun to be the smartest person in the room. For rockstar designers to demonstrate solid perforance, they should be surrounded by smart people. The team should have very high competence (both technical and emotional).

Most of the time, it’s better not to focus on an individual but on building a team to get the best results.

The ultimate goal is not to hire the best of the best but to grow a rockstar team.

A rockstar team is a team of people with diverse thoughts and experience who share the same goal — building the best product. They love to work together — its a team of people who compensate each other’s weaknesses and encourage each other to learn and grow.

The A-team, a popular TV show of the 80s, portrayed a team of mates who plaid off each other’s strengths and compensated each other’s weaknesses.