Organizing designers to win

Team Leadership
Organizational Design
Team Optimization
Experimentation


As a design leader, it is my task to best allocate designers to the work to be done in a sustainable, productive way. Here I discuss some choices I made, and why.

Domain A (€30 million a year)

When I was promoted to UX Lead of the Professional Education IT domain in Springer Nature, it had four development teams, and four designers including me. Everyone was working on the same product: a single platform that hosted multiple, similar sites.

It seems a no-brainer to then assign one designer per team, and that is what they had done. That's how it works, right? A designer, a product manager, a few developers, maybe a BA, give them problems to solve and off they go. That's what all the 2010 books about lean startup and lean product design said.

Except I was noticing a few things in the domain:

It wasn't working.

So as Lead UX, since we were already overhauling how this domain worked, I asked the domain and my designers to try something else.

I asked the domain to let me centralize the design function.

This was a small department, so as designers we would still maintain connection to all developers and products—we were just going to assign the work differently. I worked with the Domain project manager to check which upcoming epics had design work and together assigned designers to an epic, or maybe just a story. I was a hand-on designer too.

Each designer would do their own research for the assignment they had.
And manage their own stakeholders, and the dev team when designs were made and implemented.
Each designer would see their story to the end.

This made us much more flexible:

I specialised in supporting a dev team that always did concept or pioneering work.
Other designers took other specialty areas, like Search, or The Article.

As a result, we were more productive, flexible, coherent, and faster. We were also happier. It worked.

Domain B (€750 million a year)

A few years later I was promoted to Domain Lead UX for the main global science websites.
It is well staffed.
It spans multiple websites and technologies.
There was separate team expanding and maintaining a Design System for the set of products. There was a Creative UI Director and a Lead UI designer to maintain visual coherency between teams.

Because structural functions like design systems and creative direction had been centralized, the designers did not need to do the extra work to maintain coherency. Assigning a designer to each team was fine.

I could assign a Senior to each specific team without worrying.
I still could try to fit affinity and talent of the designer to the area the team was working on, but we also asked for these Seniors to stretch and I had the bandwidth to guide that.
So in this case, embedding designers in teams really worked.

Sometimes I could even assign a new Associate to a team to help the Senior out.
And while a Senior was out, and the work is light, I could ask my strongest Senior to stretch between two teams with help from each BA and I.

There is no one right way to assign designers to work.

It depends on how many teams there are.
If you have alignment structures like DesignOps, UX Research, or Design Systems
How many designers there are.
What they are good at, and what you need.
And what surrounds them.

Stay flexible. Try things.