Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

Article Idea:

Comment on So You Think You Want to be a Manager (suggested by Christina Wodtke)

suggested by David Shen on 2007/01/29

Great article Erin! I too remember the days when I switched from being an individual contributor to managing a design team.

One other comment I’ll make is that as design manager in a corporation, your job is to push forward the design strategy of an organization in a unified, cohesive fashion (this is less true in an agency where your team members are working on projects for many corporations). This can be extremely hard, given that designers are typically half-artists and artists tend to sway toward individual work and less so towards the cohesive whole. You may find yourself trying to bring a bunch of individualists along the same path, when they are itching to break onto their own side paths!

Heavy handed management can be successfully employed by some design managers, meaning “You’ll design my way, which is the company way since I’m boss, or it’s the highway.” But this can lead to dissatisfaction among the team members and ultimately a high turnover rate.

I would recommend another way. This would be setting constraints and expectations as early as possible, and then employing the concepts in your section, “Giving Orders is Costly.” By early as possible, I mean that during the hiring process you need to let potential hires know clearly that they will be designing to the corporation mission and their ability to express themselves individually will not be the way, but also emphasizing that there is still room for creativity within the corporate mission. Then, you should create and employ design standards which are approved by the organization as a template within everybody operates, and hopefully is flexible enough to let creativity flourish as well. The design standards will set everyone clearly on the same path thereby releasing you as manager of the headache of dragging everybody onto the same path, and they are free to walk the path in an individual fashion, and also the way you help manage it.

Last note: A word on creativity: designers are creative by nature; to deny that is to deny that part of their DNA which is natural and essential to their well-being. Creating constraints, such as design standards, which leave almost no room for creativity will have the opposite effect and produce a dissatisfied design team just like if you were to employ the heavy handed method of design management. Find ways to leave flexibility in the design standards for creativity and teach and encourage people to be creative in a constrained environment, even when they think they are being handcuffed by the standards.