You've Just Been Hired as a Design Executive. Now What?
Note: This is the first in a series of posts on building out a design team after joining a company as a design executive. For a deeper dive into hiring for a design team, check out my previous post on building a design org from scratch.
Here’s the assumption most new design executives make: If a business has hired me, they’ve already bought into the value of design. This is a common misconception. It’s true that when a company decides to bring in a design leader, it’s a sign that they understand the importance of design. But that doesn’t always mean the organization knows…
What kind of team it needs.
How to integrate that team into the enterprise.
How to ensure that the team is adding value and delivering on business goals.
At Achieve, I transformed a scrappy, three-person design team into an accomplished, 30-person department in under a year. A lot went into that transformation behind the scenes, and much of it focused on addressing these three points. As a new design leader, a lot of the heavy lifting still lies ahead of you, so how do you lay the groundwork for success?
Understanding buy-in
As I touched on earlier, there’s a misconception that once a company decides to bring you on, the foundation for building out your team has already been laid. The reality is that when you’re hired, you’re often stepping into a business that recognizes the need for design but doesn’t know how to implement it. If they did, they would have done it already!
Getting the company on board means building relationships from day one. Talk to people from different departments and ask questions. Gather as much information as you can to get a better picture of the internal dynamics, what the company needs, and where design can make the biggest impact. Look for chances to share your knowledge and start proving your value—not just to your own team, but to your partners across the organization. Think of this step as building political capital.
Why is this important? Well…
Budgeting realities
Just because your company wants to build a design team, that doesn’t mean they’re just going to hand you a blank check. Sometimes you’ll get a clear budget and expectations about what the team will look like, but that’s not always how it happens. Other times, you’ve been brought in precisely because the org doesn’t know how much designers cost, how many they need, or what it means to have them on the team. In this case, you’ll have to be able to figure out the costs and justify every hire.
To get ahead of this, I always recommend bringing up the budget during your own interview. You should be asking questions like:
What kind of budget am I going to have for building this team?
Do you have an idea of what kind of team you’re looking for me to hire? (If you’re inheriting an established team, try to understand what that looks like, as well.)
Do you have a preference on where team members are located? Is the team fully local, fully remote, or partially remote?
The answers to these questions can tell you a lot about what kind of resources you’ll have to work with, even if they can’t give you an exact number.
Some companies are especially sensitive to cost, which is why it’s important to know how to prioritize—and that’s where research and relationship-building come in. Maybe what the business needs is a designer now and a researcher later. Maybe it’s the other way around. No matter what, you have to be able to justify your decisions, especially if senior leadership hasn’t done this before.
This is where it also pays to make the business case for design. (I talked about this more in a previous post.) You need to be ready to do the math and show an ROI on the money that’s being spent. And guess what? The more you can do this, the more the org will invest in design. Even when budgets start small, they tend to increase the more you can show an impact. Over time, you start to cement your place in the organization, and that’s where the magic happens.
Laying the groundwork
Landing the job is only the beginning. Establishing yourself as a design executive is where the real work starts, and that means advocating for design, navigating budget, and building your team strategically as you prove your value. Get this part right, and you’re well on your way to building a successful team.
In future posts, we’ll zoom in on your early design roles, what to look for in hiring, pitfalls to avoid, and other important aspects of hiring a design team. Building a design org is an art, one that requires creativity and adaptability, but with the right strategy, you can set the stage for excellence. Stay tuned for more on this topic!