Exploring high impact design teams

Diving into what makes a high performing design team

Q: What makes a great design team?

I get to spend time with incredible teams. Over my career I’ve noticed similarities with the design teams who continue to make impact inside of organisations regardless if it’s Industrial Design, Digital Product Design or Brand Design.

Often I hear frustrations from designers such as:

• We’re not listened to, our company does not value design

• Our leader isn’t even from a design background

• We’re production designers, PM’s do a lot of strategic thinking.

And the list goes on. This article isn’t here to moan about what companies don’t do, but shed the light on what I feel companies who do value design do well.

I recently made a post on LinkedIn listing companies who I rate highly from a design perspective and why.

Here are 11 thoughts on what makes a great design team:

1. The design leader is a master at design integration. They can advocate for design at the highest business tables. They have high IQ, can manage upwards, can shield the team from politics.

2. They have strong internal sponsors. Design reports to the correct person in the organisation allowing design to influence at product and business levels. I was speaking to a Exec Board member at a client of mine 2 months ago who said "Even with the cost pressures in the markets, we will not scale down our investment in design. Design is the DNA of the business."

3. They value design away from pure pixel-perfect UI. They recognise products, services and customer experience are all interconnected. They take an integrated view of their customer journey to create end to end experience for them.

4. Multiple design discipline. Because they recognise CX, Service, Product is interconnected they understand the need for specialist designers. Content Design, Research, UX, Motion. Designers aren’t expected to do it all. Of course you will have generalists. And they are equal in pay, so many times I see content design is paid considerably less and undervalued.

5. Strong inter-discipline relationships with brand, marketing, product and engineering.

6. Equally world-class engineers. I’ve found the best design teams I’ve worked with don’t just outsource engineering they invest in design and eng sitting close together, having engineers who value and understand design and vice versa. I can’t tell you frustrating it is for some designers.

7. Hire designers from agency and in-house. Value diversity of experience. Not always looking to hire people from the exact same type of companies. I’ve found 99% of the best visual design talent comes from agency or has been in an agency, just my opinion, they are exposed to more, conceptual, branding, complex UI interactions, faster pace. I’ve had a lot of experience placing visual talent, and 99% of the best people have come from agencies some point in their career.

8. They invest in the hiring process. They invest time AND money into the hiring and onboarding experience. It’s a sign of design maturity when a company invests (money and time) in bringing in a top leader, have separate design disciplines and hire incredible ICs.

   
   They don’t mess around when it comes to hiring. They invest in internal TA/Recruiters, salaries are aligned to the market, they provide detail to the team, process, work in order to sell the role to top designers, the interview processes are rigorous but organised and they interview many but ones they do they’ve vetted properly before committing to interviewing. They often know what they want if they’ve gone to market with a role. They do not have inflated titles, if anything people get pegged down when they join.

They are transparent with examples of career frameworks etc:

• Intercom - Intercom.design

• Wise - wise.design

• Spotify - spotify.design

They are not trying to catch you out.

9. They work on their internal and external brand. Investing time in town halls internally to discuss what design is doing and how it can make impact across the wider organisation inviting wider business stakeholders to get excited about the possibilities of what design can do for them.

10. Their products make a tangible difference to people’s lives, and is not harmful to people or the planet. Dieter Rams 10 principles are timeless.

    A personal highlight was seeing Dieter Rams get a lifetime achievement award at iF award ceremony in Berlin April 2024.

    

11. They hire top notch visual design talent (focus on craft)

More companies are reaching out to me talking about how they need to “level-up design craft”

How do the top design teams do this?

• They hire from agencies. Look at companies like Apple, Slack, Squarespace etc. They’ve hired designers from Fantasy, Ueno, Uswto, Huge. All insanely talented at visual craft.

• They’ve got leaders who value design craft - If I think of products like Slack, Stripe, Notion, Ramp, Airbnb etc they all have insane levels of craft, because the leaders care about it.

• They hire designers who have a balance of business acumen, technical ability and thirst to delight the user with high level of detail.

• They have balanced teams

• Some also work with design firms for re-brands as they value different fresh perspectives.

• Design is placed in the place of the organisation to be successful and effect business change. i.e correct reporting lines.

• The teach their designers to have business literacy

• They think about a succession plan - Companies who value design are prepared for scenarios, they are working on succession plans years ahead of time for their leader. For example I am working with a company in Germany, who have been working for 2 years to complete the succession plan. So often you see Chief Design Officers leaving companies and the role either gets wiped out or is not filled for a long time which is only going to hamper the wider design team.
  

That’s the article.

Next up, we have an article on how to build design teams 101.