Switching lanes in creative leadership

Navigating your career as both an IC and manager in Design Operations

A few things have to be true if you want to succeed in Design Operations. You have to be intrinsically motivated to solve collective problems. You have to have a high bias to action. And above all else, you have to have a commitment to excellence. 

My entry into Design Operations was unexpected. I was an early employee at Square and sincerely loved working there. I would do anything asked of me, which meant that my role changed as the business matured too. At the time, I was working as a product marketing manager focused on growth. That included responsibilities like managing the website, brand campaigns, and finding ways to get new users to consider Square as a payments provider etc etc. 

I partnered closely with the brand team and loved working with that crew. Together anything felt possible. One particularly successful project was the brand re-architecture where we moved away from buyer and seller audiences to a verticalized approach. This project radically changed the organic growth trajectory and was a huge success. Following that project, the design director leading the brand team approached me about considering a creative strategy and operations lead role. He emphasized that I was one of the few cross functional partners who brought a strategic lens to the design team, plus designers liked working with me, so nudged me to consider it. A quick reorg later, I had the opportunity to manage our brand producers and lead the team on all things focused on new user acquisition and go to market. That was the start of my budding Design Ops career. 

From there, I went back to an IC role at Facebook overseeing the learning and community portfolio for Design, Research, and Content Strategy. Then later at Dropbox, I started as an IC and shifted back into management when the opportunity to lead Design and Research Operations arose. My next move was to join Twitter as Director of Strategy and Operations for Design & Research, where I served as Chief of Staff to the CDO, and led an org of 30 program managers spanning UX, Research, and Biz Ops. And now I’m at Google as a Sr. Staff Program Manager, responsible for the Generative AI portfolio in Search. (Since writing this article, I’m back to managing a full staff of program managers.) Full circle oscillation between individual contribution and management.

When you are a program manager, you are in a leadership position whether you are an IC or manager. As I’ve switched lanes between the two, I’ve found that my top priority has always been addressing the highest business needs and the skills in my toolbox adapt to whatever that is across product, people, and process. In my role at Google, I’ve had to lean into my scrappy 0-1 space, working hand-in-hand with my design, product, and engineering partners to get new products and technologies into market at a rapid pace in a totally new product landscape. In past roles like Twitter, I leaned into skills like organizational design and change management because that is what was needed at the time.

Having said that, changing lanes is not as simple as throwing on a blinker and getting over to the right. It can feel like regression at times, especially in an industry that is build on linear job ladders. I had to swallow some pride going from director back to IC because it felt like I took a step forward, then two steps back. In hindsight, I can say that it forced me to sharpen a different set of tools without losing fidelity of the people and org leadership skills I strengthened in my previous role. It meant that the level of complexity I could handle was much higher than someone without that experience, so I was entrusted with high stakes, high yield work. If you think about growth as something that can happen in directions of both breadth and depth, this kind of change can be a boon for your development.

When you work in innovation, particularly design, change is a constant. (We could go on a detour about how design is actually just a mechanism for change, but that is a conversation for another day.) The industry changes, the technology changes, and the needs of the business constantly change, therefore it’s important to be adaptable in your skill and role type if you want to stay at the frontier of new things. Many many years into the field, I’m still learning, building, and growing. I’m always looking for collective problems to solve, to get things done, and to make things better than I found them 🙂

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Thanks for reading! I wrote this essay in contribution to The Design Conductors by Rachel Poseman and John Calhoun. Plz order their book and support indie design publishing.