Team structure

The agency model is pyramidal, with a few directors at the top, a larger group of senior designers leading teams in the middle, and junior designers forming the foundation.

1 - Design directors

An effective director asks, “Why?”. Not to put designers on the defensive, but to encourage them to clearly and effectively articulate their ideas and rationale. It forces designers to view their solutions from different perspectives and truly understand the user stories that underpin a successful design. Plus, it helps grow more senior designers.

The best directors never take credit for the final design. Instead, they’re facilitators. They succeed when they push designers to craft more meaningful stories—both directly, through individual feedback, and indirectly, through building the right team culture.

2- Senior designers

Designers become senior when they understand why their designs work. They’ve developed a deep understanding of how to design experiences that matter—and how to help other designers do it too.

Senior designers should also be skilled in explaining and defending their work. Their positions are founded in facts, not opinions. They fight for the right solution, not the trending one.

• More focus on outcomes than process. Using this as a way to deal with complexity and focus on simplicity.
• Not over-complicating. Knowing instinctively how to stay focussed on what matters most, applying a range of techniques to keep teams focused on the problem they’re solving. Also, being smart about how to use valuable time and resources.
• Asking more questions. This often means the ‘obvious’ questions that no one else is asking and the questions other people have stopped asking.
• Being prepared to take more measured risks and being accountable for what happens. People find themselves in senior positions when they’re more willing to be wrong about things. Not because they’re right about more things. Managing risk, or taking measured risks, includes helping others to prioritise work effectively. I believe that this is why senior design positions are closely aligned to product management (done properly).
• **Being able to deconstruct your work in order to teach or coach others.**This sounds simple but relatively few people that I’ve worked with can do this well. No one with enough real world design experience needs to pretend that others couldn’t do at least some of their job given the right support and coaching. The real value of experience is the potential to lead others and to share what you’ve learned.
• Letting go of perfection. More senior designers still want to do great work but they understand when something is good enough. They’re optimists that have learned when and how to be pragmatic. They get things done and make things better. Meaningful change delivered is better than perfection in most of the situations designers get to work in. In my experience less experienced designers can let perfection and reaching for high standards get in the way of just making something better.
• Senior designers should have developed a reasonable sense of intuition through their professional experience. This sets them apart because they appear to work faster, producing more (and more visibly). They know shortcuts, and how to work to first principles – focussing on what’s important. Asking the obvious questions because they know that’s the smart thing to do (rather than trying to ask smarter questions).