Getting started in your design leadership career? Here’s the first of a 3 part series that breaks down how to navigate your first few years.
Setup the new laptop. Get to know the product. Meet all the department heads. Check, check, check. Now you need to make sure you know your role. Find your job description and/or contract and take a good hard look. Often the role posted for recruiting efforts differs from what you are doing day-to-day. Copy the job description into a Google Doc, make edits and review the description with your manager. Once you agree on the changes communicate out to your team and your CFX partners.
Inquire about who came before you and what became of them? If possible, reach out to folks who previously held your position. If it’s a new role, what organizational or market shifts made the role important? Without making waves, dig into the natural order of decision-making systems and try to understand how the organization determines what is important vs. what is urgent.
In your first 90 days talk to as many customers as you can. Work with PM’s or DesignOps to map their concerns against stories in the pipeline. Now that you have a good sense of how you got here, dig into what success looks like. Often your success is linked to someone else’s — find out who they are and what they need to deliver.
Early in your design leadership career, your goal should be team success with cross-functional touchpoints. Assess each individual’s soft and hard skills. How do they perform their work? How do they work with others? These aren’t questions you send out in a Google Form. These insights require patience, care and a commitment to understanding without judging.
Gaining employee trust may take time. The team you inherited may have had three or four managers before you. Once you have a general understanding of the individuals, focus on placing them in a position to be successful. Sometimes this will mean rewriting job descriptions. Often it requires a kind, but hard, talk about ways to improve. Clarity and kindness are your friends here.
Clarity and kindness are your friends here.
Team dynamics is the next assessment. Watch how the team works and socializes during both simple and complex interactions. How do teams with differing seniority levels interact? How do they critique one another? Is their communication open, honest and clear?
The essence of being a good leader centers around the ability to craft a healthy and effective team. This starts with you being healthy and honest with yourself. Can you be a good leader to everyone on your team? Are there personality types that you struggle with? Are you aware of your frustration triggers?
Map out the next 4 quarters of business initiatives and map how your team will contribute to each initiative. Try not to slow down or kill any in-flight projects during your first 3–6 months. Use them as ‘tours around the organization.’
Determine who the key influencers, connectors, decision-makers, and cynics are. Rank the design maturity of the organization. Understanding the lay of the land, the players and the rules are imperative in year one — don’t try to save the world. Play nice and commit to delivering one medium-sized win.
Year one is one of those long on-ramps with a curve that never seems to straighten out. Stay the course.
Ian Alexander
VP of Design — writing on leadership, AI product strategy, and building teams that ship.