The accidental design manager
Ezra Schwartz asked me to contribute to his latest book, to tell my career story as a reference point — perhaps even here and there an inspiration — for young designers entering the field. Here’s my story:
Design management career. I never envisioned those 3 words together until I hit 40 years old. It happened by chance and circumstance.
I stumbled into design.
My first passion was words. As a teenager, I was reading Kafka, de Beauvoir, Woolf, Zola…. I wanted to be a novelist.
Or so I thought. In hindsight, I simply always loved making stuff… whatever that may be: free-writing with my babysitter, photocopying a ‘zine, hacking my Apple IIe, shooting abstract photos, designing an album cover for a prog rock boy band, or staging off-the-wall straight-edge violin-plus-poetry performance art influenced by Laurie Anderson and John Cale.
In college, I studied literature, but my bias for making over reading (and doing over thinking) led me to become Editor in Chief of the student newspaper in my junior year. I took the job more seriously than my studies. Accustomed to excellent grades, I barely squeezed out an American D (a German 4) in a literature class I loved with my favoriteprofessor, in order to put the bulk of my energy into my obsession of publishing provocative ideas, building a team, and growing the scope, quality and impact of our publication, the Earlham Word.
The formative transformation, though, came next. I realized during this journey that what I found most fun was layout. So my senior year I focused on redesigning the paper, curating artwork and laying out the articles. (I also swung back to a work-life balance that I look back to as ideal today: achieving good grades, political activism and meaningful friendships.)
This self-taught design work and my acquired skills in Quark XPress landed me a job after graduation at Seattle Weekly. I became a designer.
A career found me.
But I never wanted a career. I simply wanted to do something enjoyable in order to make money so that I could support my true passions (making art and someday raising a family).
When the World Wide Web surfaced I was back in university studying art, and supporting myself as the secretary of a multi-media lab. I became interested in the Internet as an artistic medium. So I taught myself the necessary tools.
Knowing web coding in early 1996 made you sought-after, and I landed my first start-up job through a friend. I was hired as an HTML programmer, but from day one I took it upon myself to look after the structure and layout and flow of the screens, since no one else did. I read the recently-published first edition of About Face by Alan Cooper, signed up for Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox and taught myself Interaction Design and Usability Engineering.
In Seattle I worked for 3 startups, spending about 2 years at each company. Throughout, I made sure to balance my jobs and my art, working 4 days a week and spending the rest on art projects, such as Circus Contraption, an avante-garde adult variety theater. No career yet. Work and art had equal weight. Though I loved both, I quit it all to travel with my wife for 8 months in Asia and move to Berlin.
It was only after I was settled in Berlin for some time, and while designing a dating website, that it dawned on me that I had been doing user-centered design of digital experiences for almost 10 years.
Without aiming to, I had a career.
Management brought it together.
Despite having a career, I had no desire to climb a career ladder.
After my second kid was born, I had gone back to my old habit of working 32 hours/week. But now parenting took the place of art. Then I had another transformational moment. After some fun work building a social network I created a strategy deck around social commerce for my boss’s boss. Whereas in past projects I was fortunate to be often involved at a strategic level, this time it triggered something new in me. I realized the power of channelling the creative passion that I had earlier cordoned off for art into my work life. I realized that my work could give me dramatically more satisfaction by bringing everything together — by not compartmentalizing work as separate from art and relationships.
My burst of enthusiasm led me to found and lead my first User Experience team. I had stepped up in the organizational hierarchy. But the real step up was the personal satisfaction that came from leading people. While leading a strategic product design initiative for a new B2C brand stoked my ego, guiding, mentoring and coaching employees stoked my soul. Today I try to bring my whole being to work — mental, emotional, artistic, spiritual. Human-centeredness starts here, with myself.
The work: Designing design
Design is about creating effective solutions to human needs. Design builds the framework for dialog between brands and customers. For me, design is still very concretely about ideating, making, testing and iterating human-computer interfaces.
However, I also work frequently on the meta level of design. Design leaders are responsible not only for the product design, but also for team culture, professional development, process & practice maturity, stakeholder education, hiring & employer branding, plus myriad administrative necessities.
Some examples of things on my agenda recently:
- Designing a career matrix to help designers see where they stand and inspire growth.
- Defining professional development as the intersection of personal goals and business needs, with concrete KPIs over a defined time period (“Tour of Mastery”).
- Assessing teams’ practice maturity and identifying logical next steps.
- Prototyping cultural fit checks early in the hiring process.
- Identifying pain points and delight opportunities in the designer candidate journey.
- Screening potential recruiters to find the best partners to work with.
- Publishing career advice out the the wider design community.
- Co-creating objectives and key results for a user research team.
The artifacts I create now are more often whiteboard sketches, presentation slides and spreadsheets than flowcharts or click dummies. But I find designing organizations and acting as a change agent just as fun as designing UIs and getting them built.
The profession: Paying it forward
When I entered the profession, the world was totally different. My story — on the surface — won’t be much like the career path of any young designer today.
All the same, I would venture the following advice:
Start with yourself. Figure out where you stand (values) and where you want to go (mission) before embarking on your job search.
Look for overlap. At the start you might not have much choice of employers, but you can always look for the intersection between your own goals and the goals of the company and devote your energy to that sweet spot of mutual benefit. (Read The Alliance for more on this.)
Follow your passion. You need to do something frequently to get good at it. So do something you love.
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Design will evolve. Designers are makers and disrupters, so we’ll continue to reinvent ourselves.
But the demand for creativity and empathy in solving human needs will always exist, so — no matter what else changes — designers will always be in demand. And making meaningful experiences will always be rewarding work.
Originally published in similar form in the book Exploring Experience Design by Ezra Schwarz.
