Coming back to this thread a little late... On Oct 10, 2007, at 4:20 PM, Peter Merholz wrote: > Chris, I think you've put forth a pretty narrow view of design > management. > >> What's more, I'm not sure that managing a design team requires much >> "business-specific" education anyway. It takes a lot of talent and >> the ability to do many things other than hands-on design, of course. >> But most designers, I think, can learn to manage designers simply by >> working with other designers and having the genuine desire to take >> responsibility for and take charge of people and projects. > > This is true only if you're managing down. But I think a successful > design manager needs to be able to manage up and out as well. This is > where design managers who were once designers fail -- they don't > really understand the role their team plays in the bigger > organizational picture, and so they can't advocate for the team to be > used to make an impact on business planning and strategy. Such design > teams become little more than execution shops, carrying out others > wishes.
I think I'm defining "design management" more narrowly than you are. I'm defining it as a role where all of the manager's direct reports are hands-on designers, where the design manager's job is to decide what designers do and how they do it. The design manager's job, in my mind, involves defining standards and methodologies, hiring/ recruiting, mentoring, knowledge sharing, assigning the right people to the right jobs, and of course actually designing at a strategic level. Whenver a design manager does things that don't have to do with helping their designers design better, they are not practicing my definition of design management. They are practicing other types of management. They may be still managing designers, but it's no longer design management. Otherwise we might as well say any CEO who has a designer somewhere in their organization is a design manager. It doesn't count as design management unless you are making a lot of smart design decisions. You can do both, of course. You can be a design manager and a business manager. Peter, you and I are such people. But make no mistake, the skill sets and the tasks you perform, the talents you need to possess, and the strategic insights you need to generate, are quite different in these two areas. I know that I for one come face to face with the "jack of all trades master of none" problem when I switch gears between meeting company accountants and interviewing an IA for a job. Anyway, I don't see how you can say that a designer who has learned to manage designers cannot also learn to "manage up" in an organization. Are you putting a lid on what a designer can do? I don't see the logic there. One need only look at Hollywood film directors to see how a person who is essentially a design manager has to plug in to every aspect of their company's, and their industry's, business, including "upward", in order to be able to make great products and lots of money. > Some of the best design managers I've worked with are those with more > traditional managerial backgrounds (MBAs, etc.) who were able to > appreciate the contribution that design plays in a business' success. Respectfully, I find this hard to believe, at least under my narrow definition of what a design manager does. I find it hard to believe that more than a handful of MBAs on Earth can make design-specific leadership decisions. I find it hard to believe that an MBA can define a design process, hire great designers, define new design research directions, guide design teams in the right directions, critique design concepts, etc. (any more than an MFA can structure a corporate merger or build an accounting department). I will guess that behind every person you are thinking of as a "best design manager" there is a great design leader who has a traditional design background. The Jonathan Ive to Steve Jobs, if you will (although Jobs himself is not an MBA, either, of course). The business manager does his or her company a great service by realizing the importance of such design leaders in their organization, championing them and helping them develop -- But it's not your MBA "design manager" who shapes the actual design direction of the R&D group, the brand development people, etc. It's a *designer*, or a design leader, who does that work. Perhaps you'll say that "leadership" and "management" are different things. Okay. Maybe it's a semantic thing. Which begs the question: Why have a term called "design management' when design managers don't have to do design-specific work? Why not call them "design savvy managers"? > If we want our design teams to be more than paper-hat-wearers taking > orders from others, and to be listened to by people around the > organization, people with "business-specific" educations are going to > be some of our greatest colleagues. I agree with this 100%, at least the last part. I just find it a little weird, even a little offensive, to have that role described as a "design manager". What you seem to be advocating is that design teams are still basically paper-hat wearers, only now their design- appreciative MBA bosses get to call themselves "design managers" instead of just "managers". MBAs are great and valuable colleagues for designers, especially those who understand a lot about design, and ultimately they make great corporate leaders... but unless they are very talented and have trained themselves in hands-on design skills (as some have), they cannot be true design leaders. Seriously, it sounds like you're saying that design-savvy MBAs are better at managing designers than business-savvy designers are. I completely disagree with that. Oh boy do I disagree with that. Along similar lines, David Malouf wrote: > The life of any manager should exist as much in MS Project, Excel, > and PPT as it does in Visio, Illustrator, Photoshop, and MindMapper. > You can't only be focused on design. You need to be aware of the > business' effect on your group and strategize for contingencies and > evangelize accordingly. This is a more modest objective than what Peter was saying, and I agree with it. A design manager does need to do these things. A design leader who decides which design resource does what and when, and maps it out in a Gannt chart, is a great example of where design leadership requires management skills. My original point, however, was that aquiring these skills is perfectly possible within a designer's normal work purview. You do NOT need to go to business school and get an MBA to use MS Project. You do NOT need an MBA to learn how to hire designers and how to run a design project, how to estimate and track costs for design, or how to fit a design process into the rest of the company's various cycles of business, marketing, technology etc development. This level of design management should rightly be part of every designer's vocational development. I agree with this idea completely. I also happen to think that this education does not require going back to school for an MBA. But when one is making a Gantt chart for planning the work of non- designers, however, one is not doing design management. You're not a design manager when you hire a lawyer to go after an overdue collection. You're not a design manager when you negotiate the rent for your new office. You are managing business. When Steve Jobs is handed a prototype of a new iPod and tells the designer "this sucks", he's doing design management/design leadership. I'll concede that. But when he tells his engineering group that they need to locate a cheaper chipset factory to knock 7% off the iPod's manufacturing costs, he's managing his business. When he decides that the stock should split, or that they will buy X company's technology instead of licensing it, he is making business decisions, not design decisions. In contrast to the previous paragraph, I don't expect any designer to acquire these skills during their professional design development careers. if they want these skills, they will need to go off the design ranch (perhaps even getting an MBA). That's totally cool, but it's not design. And of course a leader of a design team may spend the vast majority of their time doing management work, especially if their position requires them to manager non-designers as well as designers. I certainly do for much of the time -- analyzing accounts receivable, reviewing contracts, talking with lawyers, purchasing equipment. But when I am doing that work, no matter how good at it I am, I do not think I am still in the world of design very much. I am doing things that are not at the core of my skillset. None of this is to imply that designers don't help themselves immensely by learning business and strategic management skills (not just MS Project, I mean C-level business strategies). But the more time you spend doing that stuff, the less design leadership you are providing to your team and company. You are heading down a path towards transforming your career and your role fundamentally -- and there's nothing wrong with that if you think that you are ultimately better at management than you are at design. If that's the case, go get the MBA. But the last thing we need is for the very best designers to spend 90% of their time in MS Project or Excel every day, or spending all year researching retirement and health plans for their staff, or playing golf with shareholders. A great design leader doesn't need to actually work in Photoshop and Visio all day, either, or be doodling in their sketchbook all day -- but they should be using their design expertise and talent to help shape design in their organization through hiring, researching, education, etc. Design is a craft that requires masters who lead other designers. Let's not lose sight of that. Peter seems to be seeing only these two options: 1) Designers hang up their sketchbooks: Designers essentially stop leading the practice of designers and become business managers who deeply understand the value of design in their business. 2) Design-savvy management: Business managers learn about design, become champions for it, and then manage designers in their businesses. I like this third option: 3) Design-powered business: Businesses restructure to permit design leaders to maximize their abilities at design and design's impact on the company but without requiring the best designers to stop leading designers. Or even this fourth one: 4) Design-led business: Businesses are run by designers who have business experts to help them with all the business stuff. Wow, that's a lot of typing. Peter I hope you look over my sometimes- strident words with a grain of salt and find some kind of way that we're merely talking about semantics, because I suspect that we are. We all want businesses to put more value on what design can do for them, and we all want designers to be all that they can be. Cheers, -Cf Christopher Fahey ____________________________ Behavior biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com me: http://www.graphpaper.com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! 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