When stepping into UX leadership, there are many common and interrelated leadership development opportunities that come up, often in rapid fire succession.
Included here: some common themes and tips on how to navigate changes and move beyond one's own comfort zones into the new territory, for the success of your team and organization.
✔️ Becoming a UX and Design Advocate: As a design leader, you may need to bridge the gap between design and non-designer audiences, such as stakeholders and executives. This involves advocating for the value of design in achieving business objectives and promoting customer-centric approaches.
✔️ Design Team Coaching and Building: This involves a new focus on being responsible for building and coaching your the team capabilities and its overall contribution to the organization and customer experience. This includes defining roles, hiring the right talent, and creating career trajectories for team members.
✔️ Mastering One-to-Many Communication: Your role will shift from one-on-one communication to mastering one-to-many communication strategies. This is crucial for effectively conveying design principles, strategies, and decisions to larger audiences within your organization.
✔️ Cultivating Collaboration Across Teams: You'll evolve from leading a single design team to proactively fostering collaboration across different teams and departments.
✔️ Indirect Management: Your role may shift from direct management of individual contributors to overseeing other leaders and managers who manage their own teams. These managers become your indirect reports, and you'll need to provide guidance and support to ensure alignment with your vision.
✔️ Embracing Broader Business Context: Design leaders need to look beyond departmental or organizational boundaries and understand how their team's work fits into the broader context of the company's goals.
✔️ Adapting to Rapid Contextual Shifts: Design leaders must be adaptable and capable of shifting their focus from strategic, high-level thinking to granular details related to delivery, budgeting, and operational considerations.
These evolutions reflect the dynamic nature of design leadership, where you need to balance your UX design discipline expertise with broader general leadership and management skills that span across disciplines.
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