Design Management

Taught by Karen McGrane, written by Tony Chu at the MFA interaction Design Program at the School of Visual Arts. Part of The Common Class Project.

[design-management-sva]

Class 6, Part 2: A Numbers Game

For the second part of class 6, Karen asked us to set salaries for a small, ten person design firm, assuming a blended rate of $150/hour which we believe our clients will pay. We learned about the concept of utilization rates in a previous class, which is the idea that only some of an employee's time is billable to clients. Playing the role of a business owner, how do we set salaries and utilization rates if we want a profit margin of 20%?

I wish there's a way to embedded chunks of a spreadsheet, because messing with the numbers proved fascinating. Here's what I did.

How much money would come in?

We're a client services company right? Our inventory is the number of hours available to our clients.

48 weeks a year (roughly 52 weeks minus stat holidays and paid vacations) 40 hours a week $150 per hour 60% utilization rate 11 people (ten employees and myself) = $1900800 income per year

Which seemed like a lot, but then we have to take into account things like

$66000 per year health insurance ($6000 per person for eleven people) $55000 per year professional insurance ($5000 person for eleven people) $240000 per year rent and other overhead = $361000 costs per year

So if we take 20% profit off the top: ($1900800 - $361000) * 0.8 = $1231840 available for salary.

Let's pretend I will pay myself what I pay everyone else, that's about $110000 per year salary for my employees. I was pretty pleased with myself.

Until, of course, Karen started talking about risk.

This is a Forecast

Imagine looking at your numbers, and realizing that "hey, we are billing less than 60% of our hours. Our utilization is low! There isn't enough work to go around!" How do we get more work? Lower our rates! Great. Six months later we are doing lots of work, maybe too much, but not making a lot of money.

Now what? Do you raise your rates again? Do you hire a contractor, who will cost you more in the short run? Through all this variability, you know what is the one thing that is constant? Your salary obligation, which you owe to your employees.

The Number One Way to Lose Money

"The number one way to lose money is to lose track of your utilization rates" says Karen. This is why, if you've ever worked in a client-services setting, they are constantly nagging you about tracking time! Why the insistence on working at least 32 out of 40 on client work? Because if you don't, you start losing money.

Billable hours is the most important input into your business. Without measuring it, you cannot possibly make good decisions about hiring, giving vacation, bonuses, contracting, outsourcing or business development. Without the numbers, you're a captain steering a ship blind.

Getting a Cushion

In class, Karen played with the numbers live, changing utilization rates and salaries to demonstrate how subtle changes in utilization rates turn into dramatic differences in the bottom line. I wish I can show you here, but the big take away was this:

"All of this is really about long term financial sustainability."

The high mark-ups and the insistance on billable hours is really all about making sure there's a cushion for when things get hard, everyone will still get paid.

It's not just about maximizing profits. It's also about making sure everyone get paid, and can count on a job next year. For a responsible business owner, that is the highest priority.

[design-management-sva]

Class 6, Part 1: Salary Negotiations

I will never forgive you if you don't negotiate your salary!

-Karen McGrane to my class

Karen didn't open the class with that line, but I think it's a nice way to start the blog post. According to Karen, negotiating your salary will be likely be the most important financial decision you make. Plus or minus 5% salary differences (routinely negotiated according to Karen) can add up to a million dollars over a career. Karen gives a number of reasons why negotiating your salary is important, and how to go about it.

Just Do It

While your number priority should still be getting the job you want, you next highest priority should be to get as much money as you can out of that company as possible.

"They gave me an offer! It's quite a decent salary, should I really ask for more?"

"Yes! Ask for more! It's expected. Everyone does it! Just do it!"

Karen set it up this way. You will never have a better opportunity to dictate your salary than before you sign that contract. Not at your performance review, not even when you get promoted.

So, how?

Total Compensation

To negotiate your salary, you need to first understand the concept of total compensation. To retain your services, your company not only has to pay your salary, it also has pay benefits, health insurance, professional insurance, and perhaps bonuses and options as well. This is routinely 50-100% of your base salary. Understand which parts of these matter, and which do not. e.g.:

health insurance - matters

free soda - doesn't matter

401k matching - free money! matters!

gym membership - probably insignificant

These are levers with which HR at big companies will try to convince you that your total compensation is great. Crunch some numbers in your head and try to determine if it is actually great.

Don't Ever Give Them a Number

Negotiating, according to Karen, is like playing poker. You do not show your hand, and as much as possible you keep your poker face. In the case of negotiating your salary, your "cards" is your target salary.

Do not ever give them a number for how much make now, or what you want to make!

But they are asking! How do you avoid the question?

Well, you can be blunt. "I am not going to divulge that information." This is perfectly ok, you are under no obligation to give that number out.

Or you can use humour. "Last year I was a graduate student, so I made about $3,000. I am hoping to make more than that this year!" This is perfectly valid too.

You can also say, "Let's wait until we're further along in the process before we talk about salary. I am sure we can figure out something that works for both sides."

You can even try to couch it in total compensation terms, "My total compensation ... should be [insert uncomfortably large number.]"

No matter what you do though, hold the line! If you're talking salary before they've made you an offer, something is amiss. If this becomes the primary negotiation issue, then you might reconsider whether this company is the right fit!

Looking at Numbers

Typical starting salaries in interaction design roles: 85k-110k. Less than that, you're underpaid. (Unless you're at an early stage start-up, and you're taking that salary cut for good reason.)

Typical starting bonus is between $2,500 - $10,000. It will more likely be on the high end if you are moving across the country for that job.

Typical annual bonus varies widely, but the potential for up to 10% of salary is not uncommon. You ought to poke at the bonus plan a bit however, and find out how it is calculated. "Could be? ... how likely is it to be 10%?"

Really, Just Do It

I will never forgive you if you don't negotiate your salary!

-Karen McGrane to my class

Negotiating your salary is about understanding the value of your work. Your skills are valuable, and you are making money for your company. You deserve to get paid.

Being willing to consistently negotiate can make you between $250,000 - $1,000,000 over your career. All this for a potentially awkward five minute conversation? Suck it up.

Karen talked about her perspective as a hiring manager, "The amount of money you're asking for (especially in your first job out school) is going to be a rounding error." This is especially if you're applying to a big company, where they are not using "real" money to hire you - they are using "budget" which they have to use up anyway. The incentive to pay you less is there, but it's not very strong.

I cannot emphasize enough how little it means to me. I have literally had a recruiter tell me in the hallway saying someone asking for 5k above the offer. I just said ok, and kept going. It is not even worth a pause.

In fact, they like it when you negotiate, when you show some self-respect. It shows that you will negotiate on behalf of the company later on.

Just ask for 5k more. If you do that, I'll be happy.

On a related note, Karen pointed out that not being willing to ask for more money is one of the big factors in why women tend to get paid less. "It's always the men that are 'me me me me me. Look at what I did. Give me more money.' and that why they get the raise!"

You also want to be specific. Once they've given you a number, be specific about how far you want to go above it. "That's not quite what I was expecting. I was expecting 110k ... what can you do for me?" This is where knowing the total compensation is important. Ideally they will compromise on salary. They might also give you a higher signing bonus, or more vacation days, or something else.

Either way, it's a few words, and you've made some money. It's not so hard.

What If They Don't Bulge?

Lots of students come back to Karen and say, "they are not bulging." Her response is, "try again." Ask the recruiter, "Really? No? Over 5k?" Note that at this point, after the offer's been made and like three months into the hiring process, it is expensive to start all over again! You are in a position of strength. Push back again, or start looking at other components in the total compensation package.

In conclusion:

Get a job offer

Ask for more money

Profit!

Part 2 will be a math exercise, calculating salary as a business owner.

[design-management-sva]

Class 4, Part 2: Management Case Studies

In the second part of class four, Karen presented us with three management case studies, and asked us to share how we would respond. I will try to summarize the case studies and the discussion we had. I will not, however, reveal Karen's final take on the case studies.

Case Study One: Employee Performance

A senior role in your design team needs to be filled. Luckily, you find somebody who seems great, who can start immediately, whose references and interviews all check out. Unfortunately, six weeks into the new role bad news about the new hire keeps rolling in. His work is poor, and the team doesn't like his leadership. The feedback you give him is taken poorly, with the new hire excusing himself and blaming his team.

Do you, 

Fire him under the 90-day termination clause? 

Put him on a performance improvement plan and condition his employment on said goal? 

Or leave him be but get more involved in managing him?

The class considered a couple angles. Is the client he is on important enough to keep him on at least for a while? How has he affected the productivity of the company? Are the conflicts stemming from personality issues in the group?

Hint: Think about how much the company is paying him as a senior role, and what happens when the 90-day termination clause is over. Karen noted that her response would be quite different if the role had been a junior one.

Case Study Two: Team Conflict

There's a conflict between a project manager and a designer on your team. The designer, Anne, is "thoughtful, thorough, and works very hard to find just the right solution." The problem is that she also consistently slow, and therefore late in getting the deliverables to the client. Sarah, the project manager, has had enough, and want her off the project.

To make things even more complicated, the client and the account manager both love Anne's work. The head of the project management group, however, thinks Anne is the problem.

Do you,

Remove Anne from the project?

Remove Sarah from the project?

Get involved in the project to try and improve relations with the team?

Do nothing and tell the team members they have to work it out amongst themselves?

The general consensus was to try to get involved and improve relations, with a few opting to remove Anne from the project. Everyone wants to work with Anne closely to bring her up to speed, whether still on the project or not.

Hint: Karen asked us to consider the larger context of a client services firm. The project involves design team, project management team, and account management team. Who should own this problem? While Anne is clearly responsible for the issue here, Sarah ought to take some of the blame as well. As a project manager, managing timelines and expectations is precisely the type of issue that Sarah is paid to deal with.

Case Study Three: Your New Job

You are moving up in the world. A large mobile handset manufacturer wants to recruit you for a new interaction design role, and are willing to give you a significant raise to do it. They are investing heavily to hire a design team to improve their mobile operating system in order to compete. They want design to be part of their strategy.

Problem is, the new design team is not well integrated into the existing engineering oriented culture. You're sometimes not invited to meetings around projects you're on. Your ideas get shot down as being "unfeasible" and "too expensive." You overhear the engineering team members snicker at the design team.

You come to dread going to work in the morning. What do you do?

There's no nice multiple choice for this one, and there's also no generally preferable answer. Some of the class suggested, "run, don't walk" out of there." Others argued that it is precisely in a place like this that design must be doggedly and patiently evangelized.

"This is my vision for you guys, in maybe five years. Someone will offer you this job. Good money, big title, at a place with no design culture. I want you to go into this with your eyes wide open!"

A place like this is likely not where you will do your best, most ideal design work. In some sense, your job is not to design in a role like this. Instead, fighting to become a part of the process is the job. Evangelizing for the role of design up and down the hierarchy is the job. You might want to do this, and set your metrics of success accordingly. Or you might go work at a boutique experience design firm, where you don't have to fight to justify your work.

Either way is valid, but once again, Karen reminds us to keep our eyes open.

[design-management-sva]

Class 4, Part 1: Performance Reviews

Write a job description for someone you interact with. It can be a friend, someone you work with, ... someone you have a good relationship with, and who will go along with the assignment in good humor. Give that person a performance review based on your job description.

- Week 4's assignment, from Karen McGrane's Design Management

Last week's assignment was both challenging and humorous. How does one go about writing a job description for, and reviewing the performance of, people so close to us? As a class, we interviewed our friends, significant others, siblings, children, and parents. Although we laughed at the relationship tension the mock performance created, it underlined the difficulty of these conversations in the real world.

Why Performance Reviews?

So, why performance reviews? Why go through this huge bureaucratic process that is so time consuming and often socially difficult? Do Human Resource departments just love paperwork?

While it is a lot of paperwork, performance reviews are key to the functioning of a firm. At it's core, the performance review is about making things better. The job description sets up goals for an employee in relations to the business's goals. The performance review is a conversation about whether those have been reached, and if the process of getting there is efficient and reasonably satisfying to all parties involved.

At many firms, the performance review is also the basis of how salaries are adjusted, how bonuses are meted out, and how promotions are considered. A business that does performance reviews well ultimately performs better because it can better align its employee's work to its business goals.

Karen gave each of us feedback as we shared how our performance reviewed went. I have summarized her feedback into the following ideas.

Goals and Expectations

It almost doesn't make sense to do a performance review without a mutually agreed upon set of goals and expectations. At many businesses, this is set out in the job description, and serves as a common ground for the conversation between the manager and the employee. It is much easier to say, "we agree on X, Y and Z, which implies A and B" when X, Y and Z has been agreed upon and laid out. Having a goals framework makes it possible to compare where an employee has exceeded expectations, and where they have fallen short.

The manager's job is to ensure their employee's goals are lined up with the business's goals. By being transparent about its goals, financially and otherwise, a business can more successfully get its employees goals appropriately aligned.

Structuring the Review

Performance review conversations go a lot better when it is a two-way dialogue, and not a top down decree. A dialogue is key to creating a shared understanding about current performance and future goals, without which it is difficult to move forward. Unfortunately, dialogue can be difficult to create within the inherent power dynamic of a manager/employee hierarchal relationship. Take steps to intentionally give the employee room to speak their minds, and make sure the employee feels heard.  One way to ensure dialogue is to invite the employee to first self-evaluate, which allows the manager to hear and respond to issues.

Giving Feedback

Make feedback specific. Try to attach feedback to specific instances of events and actions. It gives the feedback context, and ensures the employee understands that the feedback is evidence based. Unfortunately, you as a manager may not always be able to witness first hand the issues around performance. It is difficult to get specific instances to talk about in a performance review if you only talk to the team about the employee's performance once a year. Be sure to gather feedback from the team working with the employee regularly to get realistic and specific evidence.

Structure the feedback to help employees listen and feel positively about the review. Give positive feedback first, couch negative feedback in positive goals to strive for, and end with a summary of the positive feedback and recommendations. Karen called this the feedback sandwich.

Receiving Feedback

As an employee, you do one performance review a year, maybe, and its for yourself. As a manager, you may have to do a dozen of these, and struggle to find specific feedback for each employee. The exercise impressed upon us how difficult this is to do. Karen's point, "You manager could be just as nervous as you are. They are thinking, 'Oh geez how is this person going to take what I am going to say?'" So when receiving feedback, understand where it is coming from, both in terms of the manager's perspective, as well as the managerial machinery driving this whole process.

Karen also mentions the importance of making your voice heard. "The people who are getting a raise are those who are asking for a raise, and can it up with that spreadsheet." The spreadsheet Karen refers to is the spreadsheet that catalogues all the amazing you do, which she recommends every designer to keep. This is especially relevant if you want a promotion. At a large company, you cannot expect to get a promotion unless you can, line-by-line, point out how you are already fulfilling large parts of the responsibilities of the role you are asking for.

[design-management-sva]

Class 3: Hiring Process

Hiring. Many of us want to get hired at some point. Some of us want to do the hiring eventually. Karen takes us through the mindset of someone who is looking to hire designers, and how we can best position ourselves to work for the companies we like.

"They need you more than you need them."

This, Karen says, is one of the hardest things for new graduate to wrap their heads around. Companies looking to hire are usually desperately trying to fill a role. Maybe someone just left and projects are piling up. Maybe the company is just growing quickly. Thinking more broadly about the industry, there is simply more new technology coming into the world than their are qualified designers to design them. Just think about all the new products and services that are being created everyday.

That said, to maximize our chance of getting the jobs we want, Karen wants us to:

Understand the mindset of the person doing the hiring. i.e. the hiring manager

Understand yourself, your skills, and how you communicate your fit for the company

Make a connection

Job postings are a complete and utter waste of your time. Personal contacts is the only thing that matters in getting a job. -Karen

Don't spam fifty companies with generic, carbon copies of your resume and cover letters. Focus on a handful of companies, find out as best you can who is hiring and what their needs are. "If you don't care enough to put the effort into finding the hiring manager's name? You don't care enough about the job."

Most importantly, make a personal connection with people who work at places that you're interested in. Start doing this now, even if you're not actively looking for a job. Meet them at conferences, go for a coffee, reach out on twitter. A personal connection  builds a stronger case than any resume or cover letter you can put together.

Have empathy, be human. We hear this all the time as advice for designers, but this theme comes up again and again in this class on hiring. Keep in mind that the hiring manager has their own problems and pressures to deal with, and their own desires and needs. The better you can empathize with their position, and shape your approach accordingly, the more likely you will stand out.

Build a Reputation

Ideally, when your resume comes across the hiring manager's desk, you want your name to ring a bell. To get there, you need to start building your public reputation. How? Talk to people. Network at local events. Volunteer. Talk to people during breaks at conference. Don't be a wall flower. Have a strategy for talking to people. Is there someone you want to meet? Shoot them an email before hand! Also, 

"I can't tell you how many perfectly lovely people I've met at conferences and forgotten. Send that person a note once in a while!" -Karen

It's hard to build a public reputation without some conference speaking. Fortunately, many conferences have opportunities specifically for less well known designers. Make plans for getting yourself in front of the design community. Finally, Karen cautioned us that personal brand building eventually reaches a point of diminishing return. Don't get yourself over expose at the detriment of your design practise.

Resumes

Let's get the general tips out of the way:

Start with why you're awesome. What makes you stand out? It's not because you're "passionate about user experience." That's the baseline.

Organize your resume according to positions held, or relevant skills. Position held is simpler, but you might want to organize according to relevants skills if you are just starting out, or if you have odd gaps in your work experience

Put work experience first, education credentials second.

Use action verbs to describe your accomplishments. Start with the hardest hitting verbs you can find. If you want to describe a collaborative effort, put the collaboration stuff in the second clause. e.g. Designed awesome sauce pan, in collaboration with materials engineers.

Thinking of doing a fancy infographic style resume? Don't. All that says is that you want to stand out more than efficiently tell me how you're going to solve the hiring manager's problems.

Check your spelling and grammar. Imagine you're looking at 50 of these, you'd be looking for reasons to throw resumes out too. Don't let silly mistakes be the reason your resume gets tossed.

Send your resume as a PDF, and name it with your name. "I get a pile of 50 resumes. How many do you think are named resume.pdf?"

"I am busy. I am tired. All I care about is the problem I need you to solve."

Think about writing your resume as a design problem. What are the goals of the hiring manager? They want to quickly shift through a pile of resumes and find the few they will investigate. The resume that helps them do that is scannable, concise, and written for the needs of the role. Design your resume accordingly. Plainly communicate through information design and good writing why you are fit for the role.

Cover letter

"Write to me! As a person! Karen, this is what I know about you. This is why I want to work with you. Show me that you care! A cover letter like this makes my day!" -Karen

Once again the theme of empathy comes up. You cover letter is your opportunity to tell your hiring manager what you know about their needs, and why you are the right person to solve their problem. This is, of course, premised on your research into the company you are applying to. Do you research!

I've hired people who are technically less qualified, but whose passion for the work comes through in the cover letter. Remember there's an actual person at the other end of the hiring process, who is excited when they find that other people want to work with them. -Karen

So, write like a real person. Sound like yourself. The cover letter is where you voice can really come through.

Karen's Tip: Make your cover letter the email, and the resume your attachment. Make it as easy as possible to see the cover letter.

Portfolio

Don't assume people will look at your portfolio. For some hiring managers, this might be the first thing they look at. For Karen, the portfolio is looked at if you survive the resume and cover letter filtering.

Tips:

Must be easy to navigate. A basic scroll navigation is great. No one has time to figure out your revolutionary navigation scheme.

Organize by clients and deliverable types e.g. sketches, wireframes, prototypes, user research, etc.

Unless your client is the CIA (or Apple), don't let NDA's stand in the way of showing at least some of your work. This is especially true if your work is public for the internet to see anyways.  Find a way to anonymize the work and still let your design process show through.

You've only got the hiring manager's attention for a couple minutes, and they are there to establish your basic credibility i.e. can you demonstrate basic coverage of the skills that the company needs. Keep it simple.

Interview Portfolio

"I don't really want to look at your portfolio. What I really want is to have a great conversation." -Karen

Your interview portfolio serves a completely different purpose than your online portfolio. The interview can potentially be awkward, and in this situation your interview portfolio is the number one social glue. It's your tool to structure the conversation about your skills, and direct that conversation to your favor. So tell a good story about your portfolio.

"And I mean stories! I want to know, of all the work you've done, why are you presenting this piece? I want to see how you got here, not just where you got to." -Karen

Tell stories about your process, stories about lessons you learned. The principles of good storytelling applies. Don't show everything, curate! Build a narrative. Think of your interview as a sort of performance, so rehearse it if you have to. Come prepared; orchestrate the story and the pieces required to tell it. For example, don't awkwardly navigate through the file system to find the piece you want to show. Have them lined up and ready to go.

For extra credit, "Tell me what went wrong, and how you dealt with it. This way I can really get to know how you deal with obstacles. Show me you can roll with it when things go wrong."

More Interview Tips

A classmate asked, "How do we deal with 'do you have questions for me?'"

Have questions to ask your interviewers. Good standard questions include, "Where does the role sit in the company? Who do we report to?" You want to take this chance to get to know the company, the role, and the people better.

If you are ballsy and motivated, ask something along the lines of, "How does this role contribute to the boss or the boss's boss's bonus?" Essentially, you want to know how the work you do contributes to your company's success. You want to know what the company's success metric looks like. (See last week's notes on why.)

Finally, make sure send thank you notes and follow up. Get the contacts of everyone who interviewed you, and send them a brief thank you the next day. Remind them of who you are. Follow up again in a week, and then once every month if they haven't gotten back to you. (Any more than this is annoying.)

Working with Recruiters

A company that works with external recruiters is either a really good or really bad sign. The problem is that it's hard to tell which it is.

Good scenario: The company is so good and so busy that it is will to invest significantly in recruiting top talent.

Bad scenario: The company cannot attract and retain people through natural recruiting means, and have to resort to external recruiters.

Once again, do your research and find out about the company. Either way, don't be rude to recruiters, even if they can be annoying sometimes. You simply never know when they would come around again with a good offer.

The number one thing to be careful of when working with external recruiters is to not make it seem like you will take a job and then don't. External recruiters only get paid when they help a company make a hire, and they invest significant social capital to do so. If you pull out at the last minute, you are really screwing them.

[design-management-sva]

Class 2: Organizational Structures and its Consequences

Why do we care about a company's organizational structure? For better or for worse, a company's structure tells a story about its priorities and its processes. How a firm understands and organizes its design activities shapes the work that it does, and the outcomes it achieves. It also determines the work and the influence you wield as a designer in the organization.

We began class discussing Managing the Form, Function and Fit of Design, our reading for the past week.

How a company understands and organizes design activities can have a profound impact on innovation. To conceptualize this notion, four models are defined, each of which describes how firms address the issues of form, function and fit.

- Managing the Form, Function and Fit of Design, by Angela Dumas and Henry Mintzberg

Dumas and Mintzberg's article began with the observation that design involves finding form, function and fit. In any non-trivial design endeavors, this usually requires coordination between disparate disciplines e.g. engineering, design, marketing, etc. Dumas and Mintzberg outlined four common models for organizing this coordination effort. They are: encompassed design, decomposed design, dominated design, and cooperative design. Summarizing briefly: 

Encompassed design: where one group takes care of all the components. e.g. fashion design, where the designer can conceive of the form, function and fit of the product single-handedly.

Decomposed Design: where groups responsible for different components work on decomposed parts of the project in isolation. This approach is simple, but rarely feasible unless a project's different components fits together in an obvious and well defined way. e.g. the design of a pen.

Dominated Design: where one particular group takes a leading role in a project, and dictates specifications to other groups. As a result, one group's perspective is prioritized over others. This is a common model for coordination across many domains of design. Dumas and Mintzberg cites examples from construction to automobile manufacturing.

Cooperative Design: where groups must interact regularly and informally to keep each other informed through out the process. This is the proverbial design democracy where everyone gets their voice heard throughout a collaborative process.

Idealism and Pragmatism

"Everyone wants a collaborative process until they actually get a collaborative process. Then people just want someone to be in charge."

- Karen, in class, commenting on cooperative design

It was interesting to observe Karen's attitude towards each of the four models. The article has an obvious bias towards the cooperative design model, which it cites as the model to aspire to. Initially reading the article, I felt the same way. Of course we want to have a cooperative model, right? We want to value the perspective of each discipline involved, in order to arrive at a superior and holistic solution, right?

Karen takes a more pragmatic attitude. For each model, Karen asked us to consider whether each model is feasible in an interaction design setting. It was easy to see that interaction design is too complex for an encompassed design model (too many specialties involved.) Decomposed design is also obviously a poor choice. Thanks to Paul Pangaro's class last year, we are keenly aware of the need for cross disciplinary feedback.

Cooperative Design is Not the Holy Grail

The discussion around dominated design and cooperative design, however, was less clear cut. Karen asked, "If cooperative design is so great, why do we still see so many instances of dominated design?" The answer is simply that cooperative design is difficult! Getting to cooperative design requires a certain level of mutual trust, a shared language, the right set of personalities, and a process that accommodates fluid feedback. Karen also points out that in a cooperative design model, the difficulty often lies in recognizing the bounds of roles, and the coordination of boundaries between people working together. It's great when it all comes together, but it is a finicky process.

... and Dominated Design is not so bad

Dominated design, while less fluid and holistic, has the advantage of being more efficient, predictable, and easier to implement. Karen's earlier quote, while half in jest, points to people's desire for clarity in a project. A dominated design approach is great at providing clarity.

In the reading, the authors cites a variant of dominated design called visionary design, where a common vision is established up front and championed by a leader. This seemed promising! Of course, in order for this to work, the leader must have credibility amongst the various collaborating groups, and must continually champion the vision to keep the teams in line. Finding a leader of this caliber may be just as difficult as establishing a cooperative culture.

"Your Process Has to be Based in Reality!"

In a design agency, where a company's success depends on maintaining its profit-and-loss balance and fulfilling its deadlines, the more dependable dominated design approach often wins out over a potentially cooperative design approach. Even in a product driven company (e.g. a start-up) often clarity is easier to achieve than consensus. How we are to organize our design process depends on numerous constraints, both within the domain of design (e.g. scope, goals, and disciplines involved) and outside of it (e.g. staffing, resources available, time constraints, company culture.) There is no single prescription.

This appears to be a recurring theme in Karen's class. Often what we consider as inferior choices in design processes are shaped by pressures originating from outside the considerations of design.

Looking at Org Charts

In the second part of class, we looked org charts the class gathered as homework assignments from the past week. Based on what we could scrap together from company websites, linkedin, and phone calls, we each presented a hypothesized org chart from a company of our choice. Amongst those presented are: IDEO, Smart Design, Etsy, Microsoft, Spotify, Fab.com and Twitter.

Be a detective. What can you find out about this company? What titles, what departments? How many major silos do the companies have? How many levels of management?

As a designer, you can really be a wide variety of groups in an organization: engineering, IT, strategy, marketing, creative groups. Where you report will make those jobs wildly different!

One of the saddest thing I've heard in interviews is this, "It's really frustrating working here. My job shouldn't be to convince you that I should get to do my job!"

- Karen, when she explained the org chart assignment in class 1

That last line really stood out. My job shouldn't be to convince you that I should get to do my job! As a designer, you don't want to work somewhere that tacked design onto its processes as an after thought. Else you'd end up with ... that. Karen emphasized that we need to find out about a company's priorities and processes, and one way to do that is to look at its org chart.

Reading Between the Reporting Lines

No one wants to be equal. Or, everyone wants to be equal until someone wants a raise. - Karen McGrane, during class.

Our assignment for the week was to research various companies' organization structure. Amongst the companies we presented are IDEO, Smart Design, Etsy, Microsoft, Spotify, Fab.com and Twitter. Throughout the discussion around the organizational structure, Karen asked us to look outside the scope of design and consider the political, economical and managerial pressures that shapes the structure. We considered a series of questions:

Size and Silos: how are the functions of the company divided? What are the labels? How big is each silo? How big are they relative to each other? How much coordination or crosstalk are there between silos? Do you think there are conflicts between the silos? 

The size and division of silos in an organization hints at the relative importance of functions that organization. The size of an organization also tends to dictate how specialized roles are, and how much flexibility there are around role boundaries.

Access and Influence: How many levels of reporting are there between upper management and the average employee in the company? How are teams organized? Where are the profit centers? Who hold the purse-strings?

We can see some indication of access and influence in a company by looking at the depth, breadth and linkages of the branches in the org chart. Karen talked about how the distribution of budgets have a dramatic effect on how much collaboration happens between silos, citing universities as prime examples of needlessly duplicated functions due to a distributed function.

Legacy and Politics: How did the company start? Where is its organizational emphasis? How does it handle staffing, HR and promotions?

A particular group may have outsized influence because of a company's legacy being from that group. Or it may be that's the company's profit center. A company may have a deep reporting structure might reflect the complexity of its operation, or it might simply stem from the need to give promotions to people.

Would You Work Here?

At the end of the day, all of this detective work is meant to help us answer this question, "Would you work here?" By looking at these's companies' organizational structure, we can begin to decipher whether a company is a good environment for a designer. We can also start to understand what role we might play, and what kind of problems the organization is hiring us to solve.

[design-management-sva]

Class 1: Introduction to Design Management

Working in isolation, it’s not difficult to imagine ways we could design a better world. In many cases, coming up with a design for a better product or service—one that’s easier to use, more engaging and less frustrating—is the easy part. Designs (and designers) succeed for reasons that go beyond just the quality of the work. Getting a project implemented and launched requires designers to work in teams of people, manage schedules, budgets, and resources, and above all, demonstrate how their work contributes to the overall success of the business.

From Karen McGrane's Design Management Class Syllabus

Design Management is about the strategic, operational and tactical considerations of design. How does design actually get done? How does it get proposed? How does it get budgeted? How does it get communicated? How does it get buy-in? How does it get managed? How does it get paid for? The course is written with the design-as-a-service business model in mind, but will be applicable to design work of all kinds.

Karen began the class with discussion,

"What does good work mean?"

The class had a number of answers. Good work achieves a predefined goal. Good work is finding a well defined problem. Good work is the best that could be done with the given resources and capabilities. etc.

"How many of you would like to make money?" Most hands go up.

"What does it mean to make money, in the context of your work? What does it mean to have your work be valued?"

One of the clearest demonstration of the value of your work is money. Money may not be the goal. It is, however, a yardstick. It is also an input, and it is required to keep doing good work. You can also see that you work is valued when you are given responsibilities.

(My take: At the end of the day, you want to do good work, work that you can be proud of, and you want to get paid for it. Design management is about the methodology of that.)

This is pretty much the entire class. You start with an idea. Some shit happens. If things go well, money pops out the other end. Design Management is about that messy process in the middle.

The False Spectrum

Many young designers thinks that there's a spectrum between doing good work, and making money. On one hand you have good work that is sexy, high profile, and pushes the envelope. On the other hand, you have boring work, production stuff, crappy projects that makes money.

Karen says no. It isn't a linear continuum, however, it is actually a matrix.

This is the matrix where you will spend the rest of your design career.  You will do good work, and you will do crappy work. You will make money and be valued, and you will also lose money and be devalued. The goal here is to spend as much time as possible in the top right quadrant, and as little time as possible in the bottom left. You will, however, spend time in each and every one of these quadrants, guaranteed. 

You will spend quite a bit of time up down in the bottom right. There will be times where you do good work, but over invest! You'll do more than necessary. You will make choices with the belief that, if you put a little extra effort in, you are making some contract with the universe where you will get some extra reward. This is nonsense. What you will end up doing is doing good work and losing money. That's ok. It happens. There are also good, legitimate reasons to be here. Make sure you know why you are doing it though.

Also, you may learn to love being in the top left quadrant. This is the "put gas in my car" quadrant. It will not excite you. It will not look sexy. It will not be worth telling your friends. Nonetheless, there will be days when you want a nice client with a problem you can solve who pay their bills on time. There is a lot to be said for doing work that solves a problem for someone, even if it is not the most exciting problem in the world.

Finally, you will spend some time in the bottom left. You'll find yourself doing work you hate for a client who is not paying you anything. It happens. It happens to everyone. One of the goals of this class is to teach you some tricks to recognize it, and get out of it as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Good Design Is the Easy* Part

(*Not actually easy, but it is not the hardest part.)

Coming up with an idea for a better designed service, or system, or product is often not the hard part. Working in isolation, we can come up with ways to solve most of the world's problems. Real world problems, however, do not get solved in isolation. To put our ideas to work, we need to invest money and resources. We need concerted effort from large, complicated organizations and system. This is what's called operationalizing design, and it is difficult!

Design gets done at three levels; the tactical, the operational, and the strategic.

Tactical: Your design may involve some high minded ideals and a broad vision. It ultimately gets done, however, at the tactical level. Tactics is about how you actually get design implemented in the real world. You will learn basic tactics about how designers manage scope, budget, resources, teams, and process. All of your ideals about what good work is, what a proper design process is - design tactics is about how to get all that done on a day-to-day basis.

Operational: This is design at the systemic, organizational level. How does design get done in the culture of a company and organization? How does design sync up and impact the work of other groups in the organization?

Strategic: What is the role of design across the entire organization? How does design influence and enhance the organization's competitive advantage? What role does design play at influencing the direction of the organization? Decisions at the strategic level determines not just how a project gets done, but whether a project event gets taken on or funded.

The bulk of this class will be about the tactical and operational parts of design.

Design at the Operational Level

Organizational Structure: How is an organization designing itself? An organization's orgchart reflects what it's priorities are. While the org chart cannot tell you in detail exactly where power and influence are concentrated in the company, it does tell you what the organization thinks is meaningful and important

Hiring and Staffing: How do companies thinking about hiring and staffing? How do people get hired and how are salaries negotiated? How do companies think about allocating design talent? Designers ought to understand how companies think about their exchange of value with you as a designer.

Managing People: Some of you will eventually take on management roles. So it is important to be aware of the issues on the human side of design that you will face. In managing design you will have to evaluate performance, provide feedback, give directions, manage conflict on teams, etc.

Design Process: We might know how we like design process to be, but how does it actually get implemented tactically? How long will it take? Can you staff it efficiently? Do people care about the process? Will the organization pay for it?

Design at the Tactical Level

Business Development: How do designers get work? How do companies decide how to hire and who to contract? The most common way that designers get work is business development through an RFP (Request for Proposal) process.

Legal and Contract: Designers need to have a basic grasp of contracts and how to protect themselves. Know what you are signing. You should have a lawyer, but you shouldn't feel like you're beholden to the high priesthood of the law every time a contract needs signing.

Design Briefs: This is essentially the tactical side of managing design. How do you wrangle all the components of a project together? The design brief is one tool to communicate expectations about goals, scope and budgets. A good design brief helps get all the stakeholder on the same page and headed in the right direction.

The Next Fourteen Weeks

Throughout the interaction design program, we talk a lot about the high level value of design. Design with a big "D". Thinking of design as a catalyst for change, for driving competitive advantage. We talk about using design as a tool to help an organization think differently about its business and its customers. The goal of this class is more pedestrian. The next fourteen weeks will be about the nuts and bolts of design as a service. How will we, tactically speaking, actually get good work done, and get paid for it?