Transitioning from an individual contributor to a design lead role

Published in

UX Collective

5 min readFeb 8, 2022

Illustration of a woman in a leadership position by Anna Hurley — Women Engineering Leadership by Anna Hurley

The responsibility, scope and visibility of your work change when you become a People Manager. The focus of your work is more on people and processes rather than only on projects. To be successful as a people manager, you need to switch focus from yourself to others, manage your time and be patient.

“ Here’s what management is about: Pick good people and set the right priorities.” — Lee Iacocca

I recently switched my career from an Individual Contributor (IC) to a management role — from Senior UX to Lead UX Designer. I’m sharing my personal experience on what are the main differences, what I learned and what are the qualities that will make you successful to guide the designers out there unsure if management is for them.

Six things that changed

1. Responsibility

My responsibility is less about leading projects and more about leading people and processes. For the people reporting to me, I guide them to accomplish, develop and manage their performance. I’m more involved with different types of processes: hiring, on-boarding designers and prioritising design work, but also how we are setting OKRs and the way we prioritise new opportunities.

2. Visibility

The impact of my work is less visible and take longer to be seen. As an IC, you can test your design solutions with research and data to know your impact. As a manager, your impact is through your people. Sometimes, this could feel like you are not contributing as much as you used to this could be demotivating at the beginning. At the same time, as a manager, you have the opportunity to represent design and your team with senior stakeholders so what you say and do is important and could have an impact on other designers.

3. Type of projects

As an IC I spent my time executing strategic plans given to Project Managers (PMs) — A PM get a team to work on and the team choose how to get there, but the objectives of that team have been set by the strategic leadership team. As a Lead Designer, I work more on the strategy level, understanding why we need to have that particular objective rather than another one. For instance. I worked in collaboration with senior stakeholders and strategy managers to understand what search and recommenders teams should work on after carefully evaluating the need for the internal clients and the competitive market. In this case, the project is not only what you deliver but also who you involve, how and when.

4. The way I spend my time

As an IC I would spend the majority of my time solving design problems for the end-users of the final product as part of a squad team, interacting daily with the product manager and engineers. As a manager, I’m not part of a squad team anymore, so I’m less on the final solution and more on how we get the solution done and who can work on it. I organise my time, but because I have more than one team to support I need to organise my time better, and sometimes I need to prioritise what I can not work on. Choosing what not to work on is even more important than choosing what to work on.

Once, I deprioritised working on a particular project because less risky — it was an internal tool at a discovery level, with a contractor working on it. In a couple of weeks that project had to become my priority because PMs were not happy about the contractor and then the contractor decided to leave, I had to manage the all handover because there was not a designer to substitute the contractor.

5. My focus

As an IC I spent more time going deeper in understanding problems to solve and exploring different solutions. For instance, when working on search experience I read all the books and best practices that I could find on search components before designing them. As a manager, I don’t have the time to get that deeper. Rather than going vertically in learning, I’m going horizontally. I have more opportunities to collaborate with different disciplines, for instance, agile managers and strategy managers, so I extend my knowledge toward other disciplines.

6. The definition of success

The definition of success gets muddier. How do you know that you have done a good job? As IC you have your feedback faster and constantly with data and research. As a manager, you know that you have done a good job when the people reporting to you are not leaving, they feel they are growing. Success is more the feeling that you are on top of things, but your feedback of a good job might take longer to come.

Three qualities to succeed

The top three qualities you need as a people manager IMHO are:

1. Time Management

Prioritisation is key, you have to manage different streams of work, strategy, delivery and people, not just design projects. There is more variety of tasks and something a task might take most of your time. Knowing what to deprioritise is even more important and more difficult than prioritising your list.

“It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.”― Bruce Lee

2. Patient

To reap the fruits of your hard work might take years rather than months. Improving people and process take time and seeing results take time.

“If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent.” — Isaac Newton

3. Shifting focus from yourself to others

Your success is the success of the people that report to you, so you archive success through other people. Your first thought is to get to know them, care for them, put them in a position to succeed, only then you will succeed.

“Successful people become great leaders when they learn to shift the focus from themselves to others.”― Marshall Goldsmith

Bottom line

So far, I’m enjoying being a people manager, although I miss doing design work. The good thing is that switching to people manager is not a permanent decision, you can go back to being an IC or find a side project to work on the design craft. In my case, if I have to think about myself in 5 years, I see myself as a manager rather than an IC. Why? I enjoy developing people, impact on people that you know and interact daily with is more rewarding than improving people's lives that use a product. I care not only about the final product but about the people that do the product. If you are still unsure if management is a career for you, book a mentor session with me on ADPList: Get mentored by Laura Dantonio on ADPList adplist.org • 1 min read.

Resources

Useful links for people thinking of switching: