How to manage designers — when you’re not a designer

A friend recently opened a startup and needed help hiring designers, since he has no idea how to interview them to identify a good fit.

I asked him who will be managing this designer, and he said he will.
But, if you don’t know how to interview someone to identify talent, you’ll definitely have challenges leveraging the power and impact design can have on your product and organization.

While I believe it’s always optimal to have designers roll up to design leadership (as we do at Meta), it’s often not the case, or even possible, at some companies and structures.

So how can you manage design, if you don’t have the experience to give feedback, ask guiding questions, and empower them to do their best work?

Here are some tips that I hope can help you build a great partnership with your designer, and get the most out of your collaboration. It will also help you in retaining people at your company by keeping them happy.

1. Set expectations and responsibilities
   As you build your relationship, have very explicit discussions about where design fits in the process, and what is its role.
   Tip: Design should be involved in all parts of the process, from the very beginning.
   By understanding ALL the motives, including the business aspect, a designer will be best positioned to connect the dots between the different values for both the user and the company.
2. Understand their process
   Get involved and understand how they make decisions and why.
   What is the thought process they go through from the initial problem to a final solution, and what steps along the way should be milestones to define successful progress.
   It will cost you valuable time if you work in a silo, and wait till a lot of work could be done in the wrong direction.
3. Define goals, not solutions.
   By defining goals you will enable wider explorations and research, that will help compare tradeoffs, and define pros & cons of a specific solution.
   Most importantly it will help you both measure the success of the work as you reach (or don’t), reach your goals.
   Lastly, and most importantly for the long run, it will bring meaningful work to the designer and enable them to grow.
   Give autonomy. From my experience, I aim to position people in areas that give them enough room to explore and grow, while also defining clear guardrails to keep them on track. This could be reviews, milestone check-ins, and retrospectives to pause and look at the progress.
4. Challenge them to have an opinion
   A good design process has wide explorations of solutions, ideas, and clear goals, that eventually need to converge to a final solution.
   As the designers are the ones that are in the details of the process, ask them to present their case in simple terms that clearly shows tradeoffs and can help guide the decision.
5. Long Term Vision
   Many of us work with roadmaps of quarters, halves, or milestones, which sometimes creates a blindspot for the long term goal.
   A long term goal is important not just for the success of a product, but also to keep people together towards a shared goal.
6. Personal Growth
   You need to have career growth conversations every six months or so.
   I also don’t recommend having them too often, cause growth takes time and effort and it also needs to be sustained.
   Taking time to reflect on the achievements and milestones of the past period is important for recognition, and also important for identifying new areas to invest in for the future.
   I’ve always felt that growth recognition was the best compensation for my work, and an important part of self-awareness.
7. Weekly sync
   Set a recurring 1:1 weekly meeting that is dedicated to talking about the design work and its progress.
   Spend this time to sync on the latest progress, any roadblocks that need to be removed, and most importantly for me is to understand what is the next question they are asking themselves to answer and make progress.
8. Show care
   We designers tend to be sensitive human beings…and the thing with design is — everyone can have an opinion.
   What may seem like a small tweak for you, could have taken lots of effort to come to a solution. Give thoughtful feedback and always be constructive.

When people ask me what metric I measure to understand success with my design partners, I always say — I count smiles.

Building healthy relationships is the key factor to any fruitful collaboration, and also to ensure people spend their day doing their best and most meaningful work.
I believe that if people have a trusting and transparent relationship, it will make them feel good about their work, and therefor help them get the best work out of them.

I hope this helps you a bit in navigating your role as a design manager.