Scaling design, influencing your organization, and escaping velocity. Book Review: Liftoff! (Part 6)
In this article, I will reflect on chapters 14 to 16 of the book “Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You”. If you’re looking for a shorter and condensed review you can check out my TL;DR review. Are you interested in getting the book? Buy it via Rosenfeld Media’s website.
Chapter 14: Scaling Design
We’re getting close to the end of the book and are blessed with a very important and well-written chapter. The covered topics range from design operations to growing pains and finding a balance between creativity and processes.
I enjoyed the segments about design systems and principles, although the latter got introduced with an unusual term: Design Framework. To me, that was a little strange as I would connect this more to a process chart or flow diagram than design principles. At any rate, the examples in the book were great references. gov.uk and deliveroo deserve a lot of praise for sharing their work so openly.
Something that’s maybe not said enough is how to live these principles every day. If you don’t use them regularly when reviewing work or pairing up on design tasks, I’d urge you to get into the habit of doing so. Otherwise, this might turn into yet another beautiful artifact that doesn’t provide any value. I have to admit that this happened to me personally, so I know what I’m talking about.
This chapter was filled to the brim with great references for further reading, such as designbetter.com, Peter Merholz’s or Jeff Gothelf’s work, which I can strongly recommend too.
Chapter 15: Designing Influence
To me, the 15th chapter was a mixed bag. It starts off with an exercise that should help you assess your organization’s design maturity, which I found actionable and straight forward. Other shorter segments about Influencing Up and “sideways” weren’t as useful as I couldn’t take much away into my daily routine. I’ve been doing well with peer One-on-Ones and specific alignment meeting structures, so I’d recommend looking into that.
A seemingly short segment talks about aligning your design outcomes to corporate goals. In my opinion, this is one of the simplest, but most powerful activities you can engage in as a leader. “Speak the language of the user” can also be applied to your internal stakeholders and senior leadership. Your influence can grow rapidly if you stop talking exclusively about user needs, UX, or “great design”, but start tying it to your company’s objectives, vision, and key metrics. As Jared Spool said many years ago: UX strategy means business. The same can be said about your role as a design leader: Design leadership means business.
The core message of this chapter can be summarized to “include various other roles more often and earlier in your processes”. This is something I whole-heartedly agree with, although it’s sometimes hard to convince others when everyone’s busy. If you’re struggling with that I can suggest interviewing your peers and stakeholders, before forming your message on how you can help them reach their goals. I’ve always been more successful when I asked and listened before I “selling” our services or solutions.
When you look at the title of this chapter you might assume that Designing Influence is almost exclusively targeting design leaders. In my opinion, individual contributors will definitely find a lot of useful tips as well. At the end of the chapter, I was pausing and thinking deeply about which activities a regular team member can own and what shouldn’t be delegated. Most modern management or leadership guidance suggests constant delegating of work, including your team in decisions and leveraging their expertise to grant them a “seat at the table”. I’m left wondering where the boundaries are and which responsibilities should absolutely stay with the leaders of a design organization. Is there something you can share with me about this thought?
Chapter 16: Escaping Velocity
This is the shortest chapter of the book and is simply just a short summary and outlook for you and your leadership career. There isn’t much to learn, but I appreciated the list of communities for leading design.
As a little motivation to buy the book I won’t spoil the list here, but instead mention three important communities that have helped me grow over the last years.
- Rands Leadership Slack: This is the one community I visit most frequently right now as it’s primarily dedicated to managers. It’s a bit biased due to the large share of engineering managers, but still has a great active community and channels dedicated to leading design or leading other managers.
- Designer Hangout: The majority in this slack group are designers who aren’t managing people, but there’s also a bunch of senior leaders you can learn from. I recommend the dedicated channel to leadership #topic_leadership.
- Manager Tools forums: Noteworthy mention as I was looking for a lot of guidance based on the Manager Tools podcast. This isn’t really an active or thriving forum, but you will find tons of posts of managers asking for help and others sharing their experience. That’s the benefit of a good old forum that’s been around for over 10 years now.
That’s it…or is it?
As a little bonus, I will share one more article filled with all the resources I’ve shared in this series. You can view it as a little “link dump of useful resources”. It won’t just be a list of URLs, but I’ll also give more context as to why each and every resource might be useful to you.
I’m not sure if this series will reach many readers, but if you can read this it has at least reached you. If at least one person will find my shared thoughts useful, I will be satisfied. Thank you for reading! :)
This article is part of a series, where I review the book “Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You” in detail:
- TL;DR review
- Chapters 1–3: Design leadership definitions, diversity & inclusion, and designing the hiring process
- Chapters 4–7: Hiring designers from job descriptions, to screening, interviewing, and onboarding
- Chapters 8–10: Team Charters, One-on-Ones, and Design Critiques
- Chapters 11–13: Presenting work, saying no, and growing your designers
- Chapters 14–16: Scaling design, influencing your organization, and escaping velocity
- BONUS: Collection of books, articles, and other resources for leading design teams.
