Design Leadership: 14 things best design leaders do
By: Dhananjay Garg
Tags: Design, UX, Management, Leadership, UI

Learning from the industry’s best design practices

When hiring a product designer, companies look for critical skills that help them ship products without much hand-holding or even in record time. In addition, more and more companies are copying products from different markets and then modifying the concept for their local needs or reinventing the age-old concepts and pumping new life into dead topics. Either way, companies need stellar product design talent now more than ever. But having the best design talent on the planet is not nearly enough. You will also need to ‘manage’ this talent and grow design work that eventually drives this talented bunch.

I have only met a handful of great design leaders in my career so far, and unfortunately, a few of them I could only meet thru’ digital mediums and not in person. So here are the top qualities that design leaders at exceptional places display that more of us should start doing.

#1 Customer obsession

“We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.” — Jeff Bezos

Most product designers and managers will obsess over user needs by looking at their requests, comments, and feedback. But the best products are created when we empathize with who the user is. It equates to building something the user never asked for because they don’t realize they need it yet, or it will make their lives easier.

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#2 Ownership

“Responsibility equals accountability equals ownership. And a sense of ownership is the most powerful weapon a team or organization can have.”— Pat Summitt

Ownership of time is one that most of us are struggling with during this worldwide pandemic. It means that even in the best situations, we won’t complete everything we strive to do. Leaders know that it is impossible to get everything done. Hence, they prioritize the most critical tasks. Sometimes they leave jobs unfinished. But the best leaders delegate those tasks, focus on the directional bits, and allow others to claim ownership of the craft they perform at best.

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#3 Super simplify me

Provide simple solutions to complex problems. There is not much here that I can say that has not already been written.

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” — Steve Jobs

Changing something complex to simple doesn’t stop at designing the best solution. It also continues working its way at making your communication language simple to follow. If you are a design leader and you can’t communicate well, or cannot follow through with your feedback/advice, then it’s time to work on it. You won’t be an effective leader if people cannot see your shiny leader armor beneath that jargon full of debris.

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#4 Build without data

“People ignore design that ignores people.”— Frank Chimero

It’s no surprise that companies like to capture data. Internet giants capture trillions of gigabytes of data on us almost every month. But how can you apply your astute design superpowers to take decisions in the blind? How do you design and lead your team to the right path without data? If you think about it, every product goes thru’ version 1.0, and version one has to go thru a challenging few months to build the product, launch it into the (app) space and start capturing those valuable bits of data. Designing with data is the talk of the town. But creating without information is indeed a superpower worth investing in.

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#5 Learning curiously

“Learn continually — there’s always “one more thing” to learn!”— Steve Jobs

Best design leaders are always looking to learn something new. The best design leaders that I have met are still seemingly open to learning hands-on skills. They don’t shy away from getting their hand dirty if it calls for it. Understanding and being curious should be a lifelong journey. You can apply those learnings to a new project at work or a healthy side hustle. Since you would have learned the skill/tool recently, you will be eager to apply it, and your learning will automatically improve as you struggle and dig deeper. For example, one of the design leaders I know from my previous company self-learned a 3D tool — blender over the weekend and starting designing empty states (without anyone’s permission) for the entire app.

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#6 Replace yourself

“Life will only change when you become more committed to your dreams than you are to your comfort zone” — Billy Cox

Hiring and injection the best talent pool into your team and the organization becomes one of the primary responsibilities of leaders. But there’s a catch here. During hiring, if a leader is not actively hiring to replace themselves immediately or shortly, then the organization or the specific team will stop growing.

Let me explain. After hiring great talent, leaders must nurture and develop them further into effective contributors/leaders. But some of the best design leaders are actively replacing themselves because that’s how they can grow into the organization and move on doing bigger and great things. When hiring for talent, we shouldn’t think that the new hire will hinder our position and that we might be kicked out. It’s the opposite that is true. If we don’t replace ourselves, then our growth/position will stagnate over time. We’ll end up doing the same tasks over and over again till it becomes highly toxic or mundane. Eventually, you’ll be kicking yourself out of the organization. Replacing ourselves is the best strategy to grow a career internally within an organization.

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#7 Raise the bar

“Every great design begins with an even better story.” — Lorinda Mamo

It’s time to raise your standards and deliver. When influential design leaders lead at a high standard, two things happen. One, others follow the path they lay and try providing at similar or even high standards—two, over time, the delivery standards of the entire increase exponentially.

One great example here is design-systems implementation. If we search online, we’ll find a ton of sub-standard design systems. Most design systems are just component libraries stitched together to create screens at high speed. In this case, leaders take ownership to get the design systems developed by the engineering teams, work towards getting the team to support the system with proper documentation, and further implement design tokens from both the dev and design sides. Like this example, delivering with high standards can be followed to solve various complex problems in an organization.

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#8 Bold and challenging

“There’s nothing more intoxicating than doing big, bold things.” — Jason Kilar

It’s risky to make bold decisions. It’s not easy to think big and follow thru’ with bang-on execution. The modern world of leadership and hiring is filled with de-risking. You can notice the difference between how startups and tech giants execute. Even though tech giants have more money to spend, they have a smaller risk appetite. Everything is carefully laid together to minimize cost, risk and maximize hierarchy. It is the number one reason why I see so many design leaders leaving companies in Silicon Valley and settling in at a much smaller startup. Taking bold decisions against the norm and challenging yourself can come with a lot of criticism from your peer, but it’s the right thing to do in the long run.

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#9 Action-biased

“The only impossible journey is the one you never begin” — Tony Robbins

Actions speak louder than words. Unfortunately, great leaders are biased towards people who take action. There’s no point being scared and waiting for things to go your way without taking action. How will you know if you haven’t even tried? It doesn’t mean that you have to take every decision too quickly, but it also doesn’t mean that you do nothing. Analyze, plan and then act on your plan. The best thing about taking action is that you try to control what you can control and let those you can’t fall in their place.

The best example of bias for action being a powerful force:

Many years ago, a young man was stuck in an airport while on his way to visit his girlfriend when his flight was cancelled. He didn't wait for the next flight like most people. He went to the airport office, asked how much it would cost to charter a plane, calculated the cost per seat, borrowed a blackboard, wrote the ticket price, and then rounded up all the other grounded passengers.



The flight was going to Virgin Islands, and a few years earlier he had started a mail order record company with the name 'Virgin', so he jokingly wrote 'Virgin Airlines' on his sign… and that was the first-ever Virgin flight.



The next day Richard Branson called Boeing to ask if they had any second-hand 747s for sale. They did.



Today there’s 40 Virgin companies operating in 35 countries and employing over 60,000 people.

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#10 Being resourceful

“It’s not the lack of resources that cause failure, it’s the lack of resourcefulness that cause failure” — Tony Robbins

Spending other people’s money (funding) is the easiest thing that one can do. It takes no skill, and accountability is low. Ablest leaders are frugal and can work with limited time and resources. It decreases the company's burn rate, and hence, even without billions of dollars of funding, the company can last for very long.

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#11 Earn Trust

“Blood, sweat and respect. First two you give, last one you earn.” — Dwayne Johnson

I love this quote by The Rock. It has a nice ring to it. It is also the most truthful thing about our world. No matter the position you have been given, you cannot force trust. I have personally seen prominent founders fall to the ground because the people around them stopped trusting and eventually acted against the company they were trying to build in the first place. Great leaders know that trust needs to be earned by doing things the right way, day-in, and day-out. There is no escaping it; you have to “earn” the trust of the stakeholders. It isn’t given.

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#12 Discover the root cause

Image from IDF’s article

Solving problems where you had to go through several hoops to discover the root cause. To find the root cause, diving deep using the five Whys framework is the best formula for influential design leaders across the domain. If you have stopped using it for some reason, it’s time to bring it back because it will help you uncover exciting insights about the projects you and your team are building.

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#13 Backbone

“Let’s just agree to disagree.” Having opinions, conducting professional arguments over features and product behavior are expected and fair traits of a designer and a design leader. Having a backbone and disagreeing with incorrect decisions for the user and business requirements is a quality accepted by growth-driven companies and individuals alike. So bring your perspective to the discussions if you aren’t doing that already.

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#14 Results over everything else

Delivering results should be the core of any designer’s or design manager’s skillset/attitude. In short, driven folks can get the ground running as soon as they are onboarded (metaphorically) and start making their presence felt thru’ their contributors. As design leaders, it would be crucial to remember the events and results achieved for a project you can most proudly speak about.

Surprisingly, suppose a small percentage of design leaders exhibit 2–3 leadership qualities. In that case, they can be exceptional, making the people around them very happy to be working with them.

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#15 Bonus: Good intentions

Leaders know that just having good intentions doesn’t work.

That is why mechanisms are so important. Mechanisms are clearly defined iterative processes that focus on the inputs we know will drive our desired outputs. Since day one, this simple approach has been a crucial part of Amazon's success, yet very few companies have replicated it.