Peacetime Design Leader / Wartime Design Leader
Inspired by
A Note on Language
"Wartime vs. peacetime" is a framing that has been historically used by numerous tech industry writers (examples linked above) as a metaphor for "challenging/difficult times vs. business as usual". I acknowledge that, in the context of the current geopolitical situation, this term may be a trigger for some readers. I have chosen to retain it in this post until we in the tech industry come up with a better set of terms that retains the original's evocative power.
It’s Good To Be Us
“Started from the bottom, now we're here
Started from the bottom, now the whole team here.”
–Drake
The past decade has been good to design in the software industry.
Investment in design in all its forms has continually multiplied year over year. The EPD (Engineering, Product, Design) “three-legged stool” has become commonplace within the org charts of modern software product organizations. Design has become increasingly perceived as a core competency and a competitive differentiator within software companies of all sizes.
Following suit, VC firms that invest in these companies have brought in design partners. Software startups looking to attract VC funding, in turn, have increasingly sought to include designers as co-founders, early employees, early investors, and/or advisors.
Design organization size and complexity has grown exponentially. New specialties like brand design, content design, growth design, DesignOps, and ResearchOps have emerged to support and enable this scaling.
To manage design at scale, companies have hired directors of design, then VPs of design, then CDOs. They have rolled out career ladders for designers on a par with Engineering and Product, creating Lead, Staff, and Principal level roles to facilitate designer career progression.
Design compensation has sky-rocketed, first in the major markets in the US, then around the world. Design leadership, whether as a craft leader or a people manager, has become an in-demand and lucrative line of work.
That Was Then, This Is Now
“The person who is the star of the previous era is often the last one to adapt to change, the last one to yield to the logic of a strategic inflection point and tends to fall harder than most.”
–Andy Grove
Many of the design leaders working today have only experienced good times during their career. They have only ever seen design organizations that grow (often exponentially), design to eng/product staffing ratios that shrink, and markets for design talent that get ever tighter.
They may have parlayed an early career stint at a brand name employer into a dizzying climb to ever higher titles and comp packages, with more opportunities opening up to them with every move.
They may never have had to work to motivate their teams and themselves despite stagnant or declining revenues and valuations, to justify their teams’ existence in the face of budget cuts, to deal with a hiring freeze, to let team members go, or to lose their own job.
They are peacetime design leaders. And they are about to realize that peacetime is over.
The next decade for design in the software industry will not look like the past decade. The leaders who will be successful in this new decade will not get there by using the past decade’s playbooks.
Peacetime Design Leader, Wartime Design Leader
“Peacetime and Wartime management techniques can both be highly effective when employed in the right situations, but they are very different.”
–Ben Horowitz
Peacetime design leader is a designer first, a visionary second, and a leader third. Wartime design leader is a leader first, a business person second, and a designer third.
Peacetime design leader sees their main responsibility as providing vision and influencing other leaders and execs. Wartime design leader sees vision and influence as two among many tools in their toolbox for achieving business results through design.
Peacetime design leader views their impact on the business as proportional to the size of their org. Wartime design leader measures the effectiveness of their org by its impact on the business.
Peacetime design leader’s resume emphasizes the orgs they scaled and number of people they hired. Wartime design leader’s resume emphasizes the tangible experience improvements their teams shipped and the impact these have had on the business and users.
Peacetime design leader carefully curates an external profile as an industry thought leader. Wartime design leader is too busy leading their org to read think pieces about what design is and how it should be done posted by wannabe thought leaders, or to write these themselves.
Peacetime design leader talks about systems and makes multi-year plans to build them. Wartime design leader builds the engine of their org’s systems as they fly the plane every day.
Peacetime design leader plans offsites and workshops to define their org’s design culture. Wartime design leader drives decisions that help define the company’s culture, from which their org’s design culture emerges.
Peacetime design leader floats at a 10,000 foot view of their org, occasionally swooping down to provide critique of detailed design work, which they assume to be valuable despite having little context. Wartime design leader is in the trenches daily helping their team members design better experiences through coaching and strategic insight, and context comes naturally to them.
Peacetime design leader talks about designing world-class experiences. Wartime design leader knows that what matters most about the experiences designed by their teams is whether they can be shipped and solve customer and user problems better than the competition, preferably before the company runs out of runway or design budget.
Peacetime design leader talks and tweets about the business value of design, but their CEO would likely be hard pressed to describe how they and their org add value to the business.
Wartime design leader designs their org to add business value in a variety of ways, from shipping design solutions that elegantly balance user needs and project constraints, to informing project decisions with user insights, to facilitating team alignment on shared UX mental models, to bringing outside-in framing to strategic priorities. They ensure that the business case for design in their company is clear to all, unassailable, and continually reinforced.
Am I At Peace Or At War?
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco,
This ain't no fooling around.
–Talking Heads
If you are a design leader reading this, you may think to yourself: “Yeah, but my company’s not at war! We haven’t laid anyone off – in fact, we’re still hiring! We’re still growing/stable/profitable/have lots of funding. Surely none of this applies to me?”
Maybe not right now. But I can promise you that, somewhere in your organization, among your executive team, or at the board meeting, conversations are taking place that could change this in an instant, and likely will.
Will you be ready for that when it happens?
Welcome to design leadership during wartime.
With sincere thanks to the On Deck Design fellows who provided invaluable feedback and elucidating perspectives on the ideas in this piece: Alexis Oh, Biunca Pereira, Jess Greco, Julie Lungaro, and Kerry McPhearson.
Product Design Manager at Boulevard | Ex-Shopify
1y"Peacetime design leader views their impact on the business as proportional to the size of their org. Wartime design leader measures the effectiveness of their org by its impact on the business." Well, then at least we are going to learn to measure impact properly :)
Let's make investing better, leveraging talents in agile dev, data analytics and UX based on my experience building fintech products for 20+ years. Opinions are my own, not those of my employer.
1yTruth! And very clearly articulated, thank you. It encourages the necessary orientation to action, impact and profitability.