Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium matthew diamanti

As a design leader in a corporation, I’ve had “gigs” where I felt like design was extremely misunderstood and undervalued. In some cases, the very first day felt like getting design to perform well in the company was going to be an extreme uphill battle and that I had already been set-up for failure.

Below are some real examples of how this has translated into my career:

Using research for validation — “I knew the customer was crying because of what I’ve been championing for the past ten years. Just knew it!”
Being asked to implement design through a process that diminishes design — “how about we add prototyping and research here after we’re finished with the product?”
Being asked to change the company culture without changing it at all — “I want our entire organization to be customer-centered, but I’m going to have to work very hard to justify a team besides you”
Having too many requirements regarding scope — “design it exactly like this drawing my child made last night.” OR not having clear enough requirements around scope — “design, oh, I don’t know, how about a new mobile app for our customers?”

LOL! Except, I really had these conversations and not just once!

The question that immediately went through my head in many of these instances was, “how did this happen?”. How can such a big disconnect occur between a company’s initial interest in design and the subsequent follow-through once they have a great design leader on board?

Part of the answer, I believe, lies in the different ways each industry — design and business — values and prioritizes leadership roles in both education and practice. Before I discuss those differences in more detail, I’m going to provide a quick overview of my definition of these leadership roles.

8 leadership roles

I’ve come to think of leadership as having 8 distinct, but overlapping roles that are each focused on a different dimension of business.

The people dimension

A business begins with people — employees & our customers. As leaders, we are asked to understand both through the roles of the expert and mentor.

Expert — we are asked to know our subject matter expertise, the nature of our company’s business, and the needs of our customers extremely well.
Mentor — we are expected to have deep empathy for our employees, for our colleagues and for our customers. We are expected to genuinely care about their growth, development and needs and be able to provide guidance that helps them with each of those aspects.

The purpose dimension

Having an understanding of people, both internally and externally, derives a sense of purpose. How are we helping our customers? What is our mission as a company and our core competency/expertise? As leaders we deal with purpose using the roles of administrator and change agent.

Administrator — we ensure that a company’s purpose is being enforced, typically through the policies that have been created to support the company’s values and mission.
Change Agent — as change agents we do the opposite; we push the company’s purpose into new areas and are asked to purposively (pun intended) obliterate existing policies.

The process dimension

With a sense of purpose and the policies needed to help ensure it, a company now has to execute that purpose and it does that through process. Leaders are asked to perform process using the Ops Manager & Innovator roles.

Ops Manager — a great ops manager is a great process manager. We understand the processes within a business we are accountable for and thoroughly understand all of the elements behind it (the roles, steps, inputs, outputs, information, and tools it requires). We monitor our processes carefully and spend our time thinking of ways to optimize and perfect it.
Innovator — a process is only good as the output it delivers. A radical overhaul and reinvention of our process is needed when it is no longer delivering the results the market or company needs. As innovators, we know that true innovation is not about ideas, it’s about executing those ideas, and we create a new process that delivers the outcomes our market needs.

The product dimension

The output of a process is ultimately the product and/or services a company provides. Developing a product requires us to be project managers and creative directors.

Project Manager — when we are functioning as an ops manager, we are looking at the standardized and repeatable process we are executing to deliver results to the market. As a project manager we execute that process within the context of a particular product/or service we are trying to create. We have to know the process as thoroughly as the ops manager, but also fully understand the context of the particular deliverable at hand. We focus extensively on ensuring that whatever we may be producing fits within our guidelines of scope, time, and expense.
Creative Director — As creative directors, we are helping with the execution of a particular product/service we but instead of focusing on scope, time and expense we are focusing on the quality that the market requires. Interestingly, that quality level directly turns into the scope, time and expense guidelines a project manager must follow.

A dynamic tension

As you may have realized yourself after reading the descriptions above, I’ve also found these roles tend to create a dynamic tension with one another as they almost act like opposites to one another! That tension tends to lead to three different scenarios for a company.

Perfect partners — the roles all balance each other out and bring harmony to the company. The company becomes well adapted and open to many different possibilities and competitive pressures as a result.
Perfect storm — The roles are in a constant power struggle with one another and cause the company to be disorganized or downright chaotic.
Perfectly partisan — Certain roles dominant the company and it becomes imbalanced but stable. This can cause the company to be at risk to competitive pressures and unpredictable contextual forces.

Design and business are a perfect storm

Looking at those three scenarios, I’ve come to the conclusion that design and business typically combine in big corporations as either the perfect storm or perfectly partisan scenario. Why this occurs becomes more apparent when you look at which roles each domain is biased towards and prioritizes.

The design industry tends to value and focus more on the change-based roles (the future’s so bright, I’ve got to wear shades!) — innovators, creative directors and change agents. Business, however, tends to focus on the opposite roles — project managers, administrators, and ops managers. It favors and prioritizes standardization, control and keeping things as stable as possible.

A bias towards business

Designers are taught to push the boundaries that business doesn’t really want us to push. Business likes to talk about innovation, change management, and thinking outside the box, but in practice it rewards the opposite behaviors and roles. People in senior leadership positions — the ones guiding the purpose of the institution — have a tendency to have spent their careers being great at optimizing the status quo!

Unfortunately, design leaders often can’t succeed in a company without fully mastering the business roles due to the company having a bias towards rewarding only the employees that have. While design leaders may be asked to “bring change” to an organization, they are often penalized for doing so because bringing change is not demonstrating business role mastery; instead, it is actually demonstrating poor performance!

This bias towards business roles can result in a design leader that feels paralyzed by perfection, by the need to transform into someone capable of mastering all eight roles and balancing them perfectly throughout their career.

Moving towards the perfect partnership

I believe that steps can be taken, however, to help design leaders manifest the perfect partners scenario I described earlier without having to completely master all eight roles.

Learn more about business. There’s a lot of ways you can do this without getting an MBA. I went about this by reading several good business books about portfolio management and business process management.
Ask for projects outside design. As great as a book can be, you aren’t going to learn by reading alone. Ask for a process improvement project that involves other disciplines. I’ve reinvented my organization’s product development process at 4 different orgs under the guise of “integrating design”. It’s helped me learn what all the stakeholders need and how to represent them all equally well. It’s also always a humbling experience, to say the least.
Understand your company’s culture. Sit down with peers and colleagues and ask them what they do every day, what they feel their goals are and what they are trying to accomplish for the business. See what roles they seem to be gravitating towards and what they are actually implementing in their current capacity. Observe what your company regards as success and closely look at the corporate strategy.
Achieve the goals of a business role through the design skills of its opposite. If your company is valuing cost savings through operations management and the role you’re “wearing” every day is an innovator, you may want to repurpose and temper your desire for revolutionary new processes and tools towards something an operations manager can understand — efficiency and optimization — instead.
Train your business peers in design. Don’t obsess over process, but focus on building awareness around the real value differences. This way your business colleagues can fully understand what your charge is, how you’ll be accomplishing it, and how you can work more effectively together.
Divide and conquer. I once had a design manager who was horrible as a project manager but brilliant as a creative director. We went through steps 1–4 above and they simply didn’t work for him. Instead, I found another person on my team that was good at project management but not as gifted with creative direction and I paired the two of them together. All of the project managment went to one manager and all of the creative management went to the other.
Don’t hire designers. Similar to divide and conquer, sometimes the best thing you can do is hire a smart person that sucks at design but is great at a business skill your team is deficient in. Design, after all, can be taught to anyone; you just have to be willing to take a chance on someone and put in the time to help them along the way.
Integrate design into your company culture the right way. For a field that is supposed to be about openness and change, designers have an amazing tendency to be dogmatic and demand a company execute design the “right way”. This typically translates into “my way” or “the way I was taught” or the latest design consultant fad “atomic design system sprints method”. That’s not the “right way”. The “right way” is how your company wants design to function based on its goals and needs.

I’ve found leading design to be one of the most challenging, yet rewarding, experiences of my life precisely because it has forced me to expand my skills beyond my interests and natural abilities. Learning business has been mind boggling tough for my design-oriented mind at times, but once achieved, has allowed me to understand so much more of the big picture behind corporations and it has made me a much better leader, albeit not perfect, overall.

I hope some of these tips will help you, too, along your developmental journey.

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Set-up to fail; how business values can impact design leaders. was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Set-up to fail; how business values can impact design leaders.

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