How to Succeed as a Design Manager at a Startup
For many designers, the question of when—and if—to move into management can be the beginning of an existential crisis. For designers in particular, management is more than just a step up the corporate ladder—it’s a complete shift in skillsets. One day you’re mapping out UX flows, and the next mapping out your team’s roadmap.
So how do you know if you—or someone on your team—is ready for this change? Whether you’re a newly minted manager or considering making the leap to become the first design manager at a startup, we gathered insights from some of the top design leaders from a variety of different companies: Catt Small, Staff Product Designer at Dropbox and formerly at All Turtles; Jacob Zukerman, Chief Product Officer at Mento; Carly Lodge, Senior Design Manager at Instagram and formerly at Hipmunk; and Enrique Allen, Managing Director at Designer Fund. Here’s what they shared about how to succeed as a design manager at a startup.
Topics covered:
1. What’s the best way to become a design manager?
There are many paths to becoming a design manager, and lots of ways to explore whether you like being a leader or not before making it part of your official job title.
A strong design leader can come from anywhere.
While some design managers have a resume that looks like a steady climb up the corporate ladder, others arrive at the role with very different backgrounds. There is no one “path” to look for—especially within a startup environment.
Before overseeing design teams at Instagram, Carly Lodge began her career as a high school art teacher. After moving into design, she quickly found herself in a management role.
While design leadership worked out well and ended up being a perfect blend of Carly’s passions and skills, she recommends being more intentional about your career choices. Management isn’t always the next logical step for every designer—and leadership doesn’t always need to come from a title. In fact, some folks will be happier as senior ICs who can lead the team in other ways, such as through their depth of craft or as a mentor.
Test out a management role on your own timeline
Not sure if management is for you? Consider testing the waters before jumping in. Even what you do outside of work can help you identify what you might enjoy—or not—about a manager role. For example, although initially unsure about a leadership role, Catt Small recognized that she had already built up some of the key skills through her extracurricular projects—and that she really enjoyed the work.
2. What do designer managers need to be successful at a startup?
Once you’re in a design management role, you might find the initial shift in responsibilities overwhelming. From identifying gaps in your current capabilities to hiring new designers, there’s no shortage of projects to focus on. So what are the most important things to focus on when taking a design leadership role at a startup?
The skills of a good IC are very different from the the skills of a good manager. Carly Lodge
Create a 90-day plan to set expectations from the start
As a new manager, creating a 90-day plan is the key to getting started off on the right foot. The benefits of this document are twofold: a 90-day plan helps you set expectations with leadership and other stakeholders on what you’ll be doing in the first 90 days on the job—it also helps you focus on what’s realistic and achievable as you get more familiar with the company and your role.
As a part of your 90-day plan, you’ll want to do a thorough audit of the company and the design org. Get to know the industry, your customers, the company, and the team—and identify where the gaps are. Because this can easily turn into information overload within a startup environment, Catt recommends making use of the “Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing” framework to identify what stage of a project you’re in, so that you can clarify what comes next and set accurate expectations with partners.
Tuckman's Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing framework explains the stages of team development and the challenges that often arise during each stage. By recognizing where your team is in the process, you can better guide them through the stages towards successful outcomes.
Build relationships across the org
One of the most important new things you can do as a new design leader is to build relationships across the organization. You’ll want to get to know your leader peers, such as product heads and engineering leads, as well as the teams that will help you operate day-to-day: HR, finance, ops, and other functional teams. Having good relationships across the company will enable you and your team to do better design work over time, Jacob emphasizes.
Build new relationships with your team
As a manager, you’ll need to build new relationships with your team. Although you may not feel fundamentally different from your ICs, your role has changed dramatically—so how you communicate, relate, and work with your team will need to go through a transition.
Both Jacob and Catt recommend approaching the transition to management with candor. If you can be honest about what you’re still learning, your team will be more likely to trust you and give you some grace as you get up to speed. Consider creating a “How to work with me” guide for your team to quickly learn who you are, how you like to communicate, and what you expect from the team. Transparency breeds trust.
The goal of Julie Zhuo's "user guide to working with you" template is to create clarity for your team on how you work. The key to a good user guide is to make it as specific to you as possible.
Ask for feedback
Asking for feedback is a great way to build trust with your team, and will also help you identify where you have room to improve as a manager. At the end of the day, check in with your team. What’s working well? What’s not working well—and why is that?
Once I hit that 90-day mark, I requested feedback from the team. It’s really important to make sure you're regularly getting feedback because that helps to build trust. It also helped me see how much I had accomplished already. Catt Small
While you should definitely build in regular moments for more formal feedback, don’t be afraid to open the door to casual feedback as well. Showing your team that you’re open to their input can continue to build trust over time—and have the added benefit of helping you grow as a manager.
Define your own leadership style
While it’s easy to assume there’s only one way to be a leader—strong, loud, charismatic—that’s simply not true. There are many different types of leaders, and you’ll need to find what feels authentic for you.
Jacob found his own leadership style through trial and error, figuring out what worked and didn’t after trying things and seeing how it felt for him.
3. How should you structure your design team at a startup?
What comes as a surprise to many first-time managers is that you’ll likely spend a lot of your time focused on hiring, even at a startup. Once you’ve identified some of the hiring gaps on your team, how do you identify the right people to fill them? How do you build a design team from the ground up?
Hire for a range of talent
While it can be tempting to hire the most senior designers possible, Carly has found it more beneficial to hire for a range of talent, creating a more resilient team.
Consider what specializations your team actually needs
Generalists are great, but sometimes you need someone with a specific skill. If you don’t have an in-house person and the need isn’t enough for a full-time person on staff, consider hiring a contractor to fill the gap.
But when building a product that requires a special skillset on an ongoing basis—you should definitely hire a specialist.
Establish just enough overlap across the team
One of the challenging parts of structuring a design team is giving people enough flexibility that they get to try out and learn new things, without overwhelming them. But there are clear benefits to having some overlap in responsibility, even if it means less efficiency in the present moment. Having knowledge shared across different teams and people can help avoid a single point of failure if someone leaves or something comes up.
4. What’s the best way to onboard new designers at a startup?
Onboarding a new designer offers an ideal moment to introduce them to your team culture and ways of working. Here are some things to keep in mind as you build out your onboarding process for designers at a startup.
Establish a baseline of trust
Trust is the basis of healthy and effective team relationships. When onboarding someone new to your team, consider ways to grow that trust—now, and over time. Activities like working style surveys and “get to know me” questionnaires can set the stage for positive collaboration later.
It may sound obvious, but when welcoming new people to your team, it’s important to remember that they might operate very differently than you do. For example, Carly even makes it a point to ask new hires about how they approach trust. Are they all in from the beginning, or does someone need to earn their trust over time?
Give new hires something to own right away
Jacob will start each new hire with a project they can own. Not only does this let them get their feet wet right away, it starts them off with a feeling of empowerment and responsibility.
Plant the seed for connections
As a part of onboarding, make sure your new hire knows which teammates they need to meet. Jacob kicks off each onboarding with a list of people a new hire should connect with—he’ll schedule the first few meetings for the new hire, but encourage them to schedule the remainder as they start to integrate more with the team and grow in their autonomy.
Get designers close to customers
The more empathy a designer has for your customers, the more effective they can be. Jacob likes to find opportunities to get new hires in front of customers as soon as possible. Are there videos they can watch? Customer conversations they can listen in on? Research interviews they can join?
Get your designers close to your customers because they need to really understand who they’re building for and what problems they are solving, so they can do great work. Jacob Zukerman
Build rinse-and-repeat processes to save time
Just because every new hire is an individual doesn’t mean their onboarding process needs to be. Tap into the power of templates to streamline the onboarding process, and make adjustments over time as you identify elements that have room for improvement. For some great inspiration, check out Faire’s guide to onboarding designers when you’re scaling at hyperspeed.
5. What are tips for building a great design team culture?
Design culture: one of the hardest—but one of the most important!—things to pin down as a leader. Nurturing a culture that’s authentic to your team and company takes time, but here are some tips to get you started.
Empower individuals with autonomy
While the anxiety of becoming a manager can lead some people to become micromanagers, do your best to remember that your team is more likely to do their best work when they feel a sense of both responsibility and autonomy.
Schedule non-work time with your team
Free time isn’t wasted time—it’s an important opportunity for bonding. Whether your time together is completely unstructured or highlights certain rituals, reserving moments for your team to connect outside of their roles and responsibilities is important for building strong connections.
Articulate your values—and live them everyday
The company you work for might already have defined values, but the ones for your design team might be slightly different or more nuanced. Take the time to think deeply about these values and how you want your team to show up—then communicate them and practice them daily.
Instagram's Design Principles
Instagram keeps design front and center, guided by a unique approach and these shared principles:
People First: We serve people’s evolving needs.
- Focus on real-world opportunities. Know your audience and test hypotheses to understand where we can be effective.
- Go after breakthroughs. Build an informed perspective and pursue ideas that could dramatically improve our products.
Simplicity: We focus on what adds the most value.
- Do the simple thing first. Break big problems into smaller pieces and don’t over-design or over-engineer solutions.
- Do a few things extremely well. Stay vigilant about the cost of complexity and remove anything unnecessary.
Craft: We take care in what we create.
- Sweat the details. Consider decisions carefully and take pride in holding a high bar for everything we build.
- Keep improving. Stay open to ways we can continue refining our work to create the best possible experiences.
Celebrate your wins as a team
As a designer, especially when working at a startup, it’s easy to get caught up in putting out fires, or always focusing on issues that need to be fixed. As a design manager, you can play an important role in tracking and spotlighting the team’s successes. Remind folks about why you’re doing the work you’re doing together—and celebrate your wins.
6. What other tools can help you become a better design manager?
You don’t have to figure it out all on your own. Here are the tools that can help you grow quickly as a new manager and build camaraderie with your team.
Hire a coach
First and foremost, consider hiring a career coach—even before you might think you need one. A good coach can help you uncover what’s holding you back from your full potential, and share tried and true advice on growing as a leader.
Use career cards to glean insights
Intimidated by the idea of leading career conversations with your team? Use tools like career cards to direct the process, opening up the conversation for honest insights.
Invest in a good design system
A final word of advice for all new design managers out there—it’s absolutely worth it to invest the time into building a robust design system. It will save you hours of revisions in the future, and help streamline your work with engineering partners.