You're a design manager who wants to stay ahead of the curve. What skills should you be honing?

2 Team management

Design is a team sport. You need to build, motivate, and support your design team. You need to foster a culture of collaboration, feedback, and learning. You need to delegate, empower, and coach your designers. You need to balance their strengths, weaknesses, and preferences. You need to recognize their achievements, address their challenges, and help them grow. You need to hire, onboard, and retain the best talent for your team.

3 Cross-functional collaboration

Design is not an isolated function. It's part of a larger ecosystem of stakeholders, such as product managers, engineers, marketers, customers, and users. As a design manager, you need to collaborate effectively and efficiently with these different roles. You need to establish trust, rapport, and respect. You need to listen, empathize, and understand their perspectives. You need to negotiate, compromise, and align on the scope, requirements, and expectations. You need to share, present, and advocate for your design solutions.

4 User research

Design is driven by user insights. You need to know your users, their behaviors, needs, pain points, and goals. You need to conduct user research, such as interviews, surveys, observations, and testing. You need to analyze, synthesize, and communicate your findings. You need to create user personas, journeys, scenarios, and stories. You need to validate your assumptions, test your hypotheses, and iterate your designs based on user feedback.

5 Design systems

Design is scalable and consistent. You need to create and maintain a design system, a set of guidelines, principles, and components that define your design language and standards. You need to document, organize, and update your design system. You need to ensure its usability, accessibility, and compatibility. You need to educate, evangelize, and enforce your design system across your team and organization.

6 Design trends and tools

Design is constantly evolving and innovating. You need to stay updated and informed about the latest design trends and tools. You need to explore new ideas, techniques, and best practices. You need to experiment with new technologies, platforms, and formats. You need to learn new skills, methods, and frameworks. You need to adapt and adopt the most relevant and effective design trends and tools for your projects and goals.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?