Making the Band: Building Exceptional Design Teams at Spotify
By: Spotify Design
Tags: Spotify, Design Management, Design, Design Teams

Although we offer two avenues for growth, I won’t focus on the expert journey in this post. Instead, I want to discuss the difficult choice that is to leave the expert path for management. Among my senior individual contributors and many of the designers I interview, I’ve started to see the same pattern when I ask them what path they want to go down: they’re uncertain.

And who can blame them? One side leads to running teams and projects, to managing people and creating impact through others. The other continues along the expert journey to the mastery of the craft, leadership without the need to manage, and — above all else — shipping great work. Any well-informed designer who’s spent time thinking about this won’t take the decision lightly, which could be a good sign they’re ready for managing others; they most likely realize how big of a change this will be and how important it is to go into the role with their eyes open.

Get them ready to sign the deal

Once leaders and designers have an idea of who’s up for pursuing management, it’s time to audition. To do so, bear in mind that:

“What got you here won’t get you there”: Many leaders have gone through this evolution themselves, so they know this old adage is true. What made you successful as a designer usually has little bearing on your success as a manager.

Many leaders have gone through this evolution themselves, so they know this old adage is true. What made you successful as a designer usually has little bearing on your success as a manager. Great designer ≠ great manager: Everybody has seen great designers become bad managers. A lot of us have had terrible managers, and we know what it feels like when you have to figure it all out on our own. I’ve learned firsthand that it’s not necessarily the designer’s fault, but actually, their manager’s. As leaders, it’s our responsibility to help designers decide if management’s right for them, and then put them on a path to success.

Here are three important questions that would-be managers should consider when thinking about their future. If you’re coaching someone, or struggling yourself through the decision process about which path to take, it might be helpful to use these as a starting point.

1. Are you willing to give up control of the day-to-day details of the work?

This is like asking someone to set aside everything they’ve been trained to do for most of their career. It’s impossible to have control over all the details once you’re managing a team, and this can create some fear for designers as they move away from laser focus on craft and they’re no longer responsible for the day-to-day design output.

But remind your designers that a manager’s life is full of problems to be solved with design: you just design different things. Managers are designing and redesigning processes, designing a team, and designing how individuals can work effectively together to create the best possible output — these are all great ways to use your tools and creativity to solve problems.

2. Are you OK not receiving credit for good work and taking the heat when things go wrong?

As a manager, you’re no longer directly responsible for most of the product design work, but you are accountable for it. This means you’ll probably start receiving less direct feedback on the great work you’re doing and this can be difficult when you’ve spent your career as an individual contributor getting your value at work from direct impact on the product.

However, I’ll bet you will find that the praise your designers will receive is more than enough to keep you energized and full of pride at work. It’s definitely the case for myself, and I’m sure every manager can recall many moments where they’ve felt this glow of team accomplishment.

3. Do you have a leadership style that is focused more on people rather than tasks?

Lastly, managers have to deliver better results by enabling people, rather than by focusing on tasks and doing it all themselves.

Your goal as a manager is to optimize the people around you by empowering them to do their best work. Managers-to-be should focus on that outcome, and learn how to delegate, instead of trying to solve every single problem on their own.

These questions are just the start of the process for any designer making the mental shift to manager. And that mental shift is really hard. Yet again, it’s kind of like being in a band. It’s not easy to go from the front to the back of the stage, but your role behind the scenes matters. And it matters a lot.

From garage gigs to stadium tours

When everyone’s finally singing the same tune, the band is ready to go from the small letters at the bottom of the poster to headlining the show. Now it’s time to think about other aspects of your band. Here are three lessons I’ve personally learned:

1. Building the culture of your band

As you guide your team to success, a critical part of the journey will be building your team’s culture. Every manager knows how critical this is, and yet they also know how easy it is to have personality clashes tear apart a great team. The good news? Some steps can be taken to protect a team’s culture and prevent the band from breaking up:

Hire the right people

For a manager, getting the right people for a team takes precedence over everything else they do. That’s the most important part of the job, and no matter how effective their recruitment partners are, a lot of this work still falls on their shoulders. Some of us are lucky enough to have great talent acquisition partners. But no matter your situation, here’s the advice I follow: “When in doubt, don’t hire, keep looking.”

This advice from the book Good to Great, by Jim Collins, seems pretty basic yet it’s critical to remember. When you’re understaffed and the team is spread thin, it can be super tempting to hire someone who seems “good enough.” But a bad hire is definitely not worth the fallout. Managers have to consciously design their teams because they’re not just hiring an individual, they’re hiring someone who could dramatically shift the culture of the entire group.

Additionally, managers need to hire diverse thinkers if they want their team to make good decisions together, and this takes time and planning. A team won’t be balanced if the members are a bunch of lead singers — the right mix of talent, skills, and perspectives is what makes a team sing in harmony.

Welcome to the band

Once you’ve poured your heart and soul into finding the best possible people for your team, you have to onboard them properly. Research (Jobvite) shows that 29% of turnover happens during the first 90 days of employment. With a structured onboarding program, you can increase retention by up to 82% (Glassdoor).