The Early (as in, Really Early) Role of a Design Executive
Note: This is the next in a series of posts on building out a team after joining a company as a design executive. In case you missed it, check out my last post on managing budget and getting buy-in for design at your new company. (Hint: It’s not as simple as it sounds!)
Does this situation sound familiar? You’ve just been brought on as a design leader at a company hoping to build a functioning team. You have the budget, leadership wants to prioritize design, and you’re ready to go… but the team itself doesn’t exist yet.
This is a very real challenge you may face when you’re hired to start a design organization. You’re expected to hit the ground running, but bringing in new people doesn’t happen overnight. Who will deliver the work before you’ve made those first few hires? What can you expect your work to look like in the meantime?
Getting directly involved
I hate to break it to you, but when you first start at an org with no existing design team, you may have to contribute directly to projects. Getting your hands dirty probably isn’t exactly what you signed up for, but it is what you know, and that experience will come in handy in the days and weeks before your first hires are brought on.
Remember that at this point you can also lean on design-adjacent teams, like Product and Marketing to fill in the gaps. Even though they don’t have your expertise, you can still leverage their insights and tool knowledge until your team is fully operational. These early collaborations can also help you establish cross-functional relationships that will allow you to cement your value within the organization. (I talked more about why this is important in my last post.)
Prioritize high-leverage work
This is where a lot of new design leaders get tripped up. They default to being an individual contributor or a manager when their time could be better spent leading. Even though you might need to roll up your sleeves at first, you have to remember not to fall into an unhealthy pattern. You don’t scale by doing all the work yourself. You scale by doing what you were brought in to do: build the design organization. This is what’s going to compound your impact and show the company leadership a return on their investment.
If you do need to contribute directly…
Timebox your work. Decide on an amount of time investment beforehand and hold yourself to it.
Do only what absolutely needs to get done, then re-elevate yourself to higher-level involvement. Don’t get caught up in perfecting designs—that’s not what you’re being paid to do!
Focus on the areas where your work will have the most leverage. In your case, that means hiring good people and getting them involved in the work as soon as possible.
It’s easy to lose track of what’s important when you’re the only person on the team, but you have to avoid getting too caught up in day-to-day tasks until you have the right people under you. Burying yourself in projects takes away bandwidth and time that you could be using to build the best design team you possibly can—and in the long run, that will have more impact than you ever will on your own.
Of course, now you’re probably wondering, “So how do I bring on the best talent—and how do I do it as efficiently as possible?” You’re in luck, because this is exactly what I’ll be talking about in my next post. Stay tuned for more, and until then, remember: Your top priority as a new design leader isn’t to do the work yourself, but to find the best possible people to do it at scale. That’s how you deliver real value.