What design leaders do

Imagine you’re a designer at a tech company. You’ve worked hard and become a respected senior designer on your team.

One day, someone promotes you to manager. It’s a great vote of confidence and a big step in your career!

Very quickly you’ll realize:

• You’re responsible for everything, but have surprisingly little control over your team’s work.
• You have to constantly context-switch between tasks with little time to focus. Each time you get interrupted, whatever you were thinking about slips away.
• You spend all your time in meetings, which means your whole day is often scheduled in advance by other people.
• You’re included in the decision-making process of company leadership. You may be surprised how messy or disorganized that process is.
• You have to start making really hard decisions with big consequences based on incomplete information.

Worst of all, you go from being a star performer to being borderline bad at your job because you’ve never done it before! And you probably don’t even know what you’re good at yet.