Building and Leading High-Performing Design Teams
Managing a design team requires a balance of mentorship, strategic leadership, and adaptability. Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to build teams from the ground up, step into existing teams in need of direction, and navigate difficult moments like team reductions. Through these experiences, I’ve developed a toolkit of hard and soft skills that help teams flourish, stay focused, and grow in their careers.
The Role of a Design Manager
A manager’s first responsibility is to run defense—creating a focused, distraction-free environment where designers can do their best work. The second is to foster a nurturing culture, ensuring that each team member feels supported, valued, and empowered in their role.
When a team is operating smoothly:
- Clear expectations are set at the beginning of each week.
- Meetings are intentional, leaving space for both collaboration and deep work.
- Designers feel ownership over their work while knowing they have the support of their team.
As Virginia Satir said:
“Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible— the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.”
Process, Structure, and Cadence
A well-run design team thrives on structured yet flexible processes. Meetings should be useful, strategic, and foster community, without being a burden.
I prioritize:
- Empowering designers within their pods (PM, engineering, and other stakeholders) to develop strong day-to-day collaborations.
- Design critiques and pair designing to encourage shared learning and iteration.
- Strategic team-wide discussions that keep everyone aligned while minimizing unnecessary meetings.
Promoting Career Growth and Development
Career growth shouldn’t be ambiguous. Using Radford levels as a framework, I ensure that designers have a clear, industry-standard path for advancement. Radford levels help define expectations at each stage of a designer’s career, making growth opportunities more transparent and measurable. A structured approach to promotion paths ensures that each designer knows what is expected at their current level and what skills they need to develop to progress. By leveraging Radford levels, career advancement is tied to demonstrable impact, allowing designers to confidently navigate their growth trajectory.
How I support career development:
- Weekly 1:1s with documented progress and alignment with annual reviews.
- Stretch goals & specialized learning groups in areas like copywriting, UX research, visual design, and front-end development.
- Beyond the screen: museum visits, design talks, and informal gatherings to expand creative inspiration.
As Dom Goodrum put it:
“You turn up because of the people around you. You know, the ones with common interests and sense of ambition. The ones who want to invent new things and do old things better.”
Evolving Both Design and Soft Skills
A strong design team is not just about technical execution—soft skills are essential for increasing designer influence in business decisions. I’ve worked with designers to:
- Improve public speaking for presenting ideas with confidence.
- Make career transitions, including moving from design to front-end development.
- Expand skill sets, such as brand designers learning UX fundamentals and UX designers sharpening visual storytelling.
- Gain exposure to user research, partnering with UXR teams—or doing direct user research on their projects—leads to better understanding of user behavior and
- Ensure the right data is available and designers know how to use it to apply data-driven design solutions that directly impact product decisions.
The crossover potential is endless, and a great team culture encourages learning across disciplines. One way to ensure designers had a voice beyond the design team was by implementing a regular speaking rotation at TPT’s weekly all-staff meetings. This provided designers with opportunities to present their work, share insights, and build confidence in articulating design decisions to a broader audience. By creating a platform for designers to speak, the team gained greater visibility, strengthened cross-functional relationships, and increased their influence in company-wide decision-making.
Making the Design Process Visible
Design is often 99% invisible, and a key responsibility of leadership is making the value of design tangible to the organization. Common frustrations designers face include:
- “Why don’t they listen to us?”
- “Why won’t they try something new?”
- “We’re not just here to make things pretty.”
- “Business goals and engineering constraints make user experience suffer.”
By defining the design process and inviting other teams to participate, designers can be positioned as subject matter experts in user behavior and empathy—gaining stronger influence and increasing cross-functional collaboration.
Let’s Connect
Looking to build a stronger, more effective design team? Whether it’s improving processes, fostering collaboration, or driving impact through design leadership, I’d love to connect and share insights.
Justin Dickinson 
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