What Makes Design Teams Weird
The work is personal, creative, and usually mistaken for simply "making it pretty". Good luck out there, design leaders!
Article 3 of 12 — Building Design Teams
Nobody walks past an engineering team and suggests the database might be nicer in blue. Nobody leans over a data scientist’s shoulder to say the regression model feels a bit cold and have they tried warming it up by softening the edges? But everyone (and I mean everyone), up to and including a colleague’s visiting in-law who wandered into the wrong meeting, feels qualified to redesign your product’s screen layouts and UI.
That’s the first weird thing about leading a design team. The work is visible, it looks like it is ruled by personal taste, and taste is the one form of expertise that every single person believes they already possess.
Over the better part of two decades I’ve led a number of enterprise software design teams. Most of the management advice I absorbed along the way assumed that the team’s output could be measured cleanly and that nobody outside the team, after reviewing the output, would feel entitled to crudely redraw it by themselves with a marker. Design isn’t that. It’s messy and the output is judged the second it’s seen. Oh, and the judging feels very pointed and personal. Managing my way through all of that required trying a few things that generic leadership books don’t quite prepare you for.
Keeping it simple, here’s three of them.
Critique without ego
In most disciplines, the work and the person are separated by at least a thin layer of abstraction. Code gets reviewed, but the reviewer or tester is looking at logic, not at the engineer’s inner mind. Design has no such buffer. A designer puts their screen design up on the full screen view, bearing in mind that it is a thing they made dozens of small decisions about, each one a tiny act of judgement. Then hearing someone say “This isn’t working” can sound, if you’re not careful, like “You aren’t working.”
So critique, which is supposed to be the engine that makes the work better, becomes the thing designers often start to dread. A designer who dreads critique stops taking risks. They start showing you the safe option, the one nobody can object to, which is also the one nobody will remember and sadly often isn’t best for the user.
The solution then is not to be gentler. Gentle critique that never says anything true is just a longer way of wasting everyone’s afternoon. The fix is to make the critique focus relentlessly on the work’s job to be done rather than the maker’s worth. Every piece of design is trying to do something: help someone finish a task, understand a number, not rage-quit a form. So the question in the room is never “Do I like this?” It’s “What is this trying to do, and (more importantly) is it doing it?”
That sounds like a small reframe. It is not. It moves the whole conversation away from focusing on the designer and onto a shared target that everyone, including the designer, is now standing beside and squinting at together. But this reframe only works on a foundation that can’t work without trust. When designers genuinely believe the room is on their side and that the people critiquing the work understand both them and what they were trying to do, then critique stops being a delicate event you have to choreograph. It becomes a quick, tactical, almost throwaway thing. Move that left. Why two type sizes here? This label’s doing too much. Ego-free critique doesn’t mean a room with no feelings in it. It means a room where the bonds are strong enough that the feelings can show up and nobody flinches.
It is easy to say ‘you need trust’, but the honest truth is that this takes time and effort from a leader that values culture and outcomes over pressure and output.
Autonomy without chaos
Designers need room to make decisions. Take that away, and you get an order-taker. Just someone who executes your taste, resents you for it, and updates their CV in the margins. Creative people who aren’t trusted to be creative don’t stay, and the ones who do stay stop being much use.
But hand over total freedom and you get a different problem, which is a product with eleven shades of grey, four competing ideas about what a button is, and a navigation pattern that changes depending on which designer was closest to the ticket. Each screen on its own meets its requirements and is defensible. However, together they look like they were made by a committee that never met and the end result is disjointed and annoying to the user.
The resolution to this is the least intuitive thing I learned as a design leader: constraints are not the enemy of creativity; they’re the delivery mechanism for it. A shared design system, a few genuine principles, and a clear statement of the problem to be solved. These aren’t a cage and they’re the thing that lets a designer stop over-analysing tiny details in the width of margins and spend their creative energy on the part that actually matters. This is autonomy within a frame.
Building and holding that frame is the leader’s job, and almost nobody outside the team sees you doing it. When it works, the team looks like it’s just naturally aligned. It is not naturally anything. None of this is an accident. It works because you built the entire team ethos around a shared understanding and agreement on the rules of engagement.
Defending design to people who think it’s just making it look pretty
Here is a sentence I have heard, in various contexts, more times than I can count: “Can you get the designers to make it a bit more sexy? ”. Worse still, they could ask you to “Make it pop”.
To a lot of the business, ‘design’ means ‘decoration’; the coat of paint you roll on at the end so the real work looks nice for the demo. Which means the design team is forever at risk of being treated like a paint shop: handed something nearly finished and asked to prettify it on a deadline that assumes prettifying is all it is.
The design leader’s job, more than anything else in this list, is translation. Not because the business is stupid (it isn’t!) but because it speaks a different language. Design decisions are worthless to it until they’re connected to a consequence it already cares about. “This spacing is more elegant” is true but is guaranteed to land on deaf ears. “This is why people stopped abandoning the form halfway through” is the same decision but translated into a language that the budget holders understand: value.
So you learn to do the translation constantly, and you learn to do something harder: to stand as a barrier between the design team and the demands to “just-make-it-pretty”. To keep insisting, politely, with evidence, that the team is solving problems, not applying gloss. You absorb that pressure so your designers don’t have to. They get to do the craft. You get to spend your meetings explaining, for the hundredth time, that they are not the paint shop.
The actual job
None of these are leadership techniques bolted onto the side of running a design team. They are running a design team. The work is personal, so critique has to protect the person while improving the work. The work is creative, so autonomy has to coexist with coherence. Finally, the work is chronically misunderstood, so someone senior has to keep translating its value to the people holding the money.
So here’s the part that took me longest to see: you don’t achieve these three things separately, with three different toolkits. They rest on the same foundation: a shared culture. This consists of real bonds of trust and a genuine understanding of one another and the work lying ahead. This is also the thing that makes critique tactical instead of fraught, makes autonomy safe instead of chaotic, and makes the team trust you to go and absorb the business pressure on their behalf. Building that culture is the actual job. The three weird requirements are just what it looks like, from the outside, once you’ve done it.
Do all three of these things well, and the team looks, from the outside, like a group of productive, talented people who happen to get along really well and enjoy their work. It should be perceived by stakeholders in all directions as ‘just another functional team’ in the business because the weirdness and quirks of the design function have been absorbed and translated by you so completely that nobody can see it any more.
Which raises the obvious next question: if this is what design teams look like inside and out, how do you actually assemble one? Not necessarily by hiring the most qualified individuals, it turns out (not that I would ever hire someone who isn’t impressive 🙂), but curating talent in a team is not done in a straight line. That’s where most of us go wrong.
Next up: hiring for the gap, not the résumé — why collecting the most qualified individuals is the fastest way to build a team that’s counterintuitively less than the sum of its parts.
