I have the privilege of leading the design team at ShopRunner, an opportunity that came somewhat unexpectedly upon returning from maternity leave, sleep-deprived and already overwhelmed with my new responsibilities as a parent. While I might not have felt ready at the time, I’m incredibly thankful for the chance to grow into the role with such a supportive and talented team.
There are approximately a million things to learn in your first year of management. Two books that helped me find my way are The Making of a Manager and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. I would recommend them to anyone, but especially those who don’t think of themselves as the management type.
For me, learning to manage a team has run along two themes. First, that I can and should be a leader. This has just taken time and the courage to put myself out there. And second, things that come intuitively to me as a designer must be translated into explicit ideas that can be shared in the form of feedback, process, and encouragement.
As part of this journey from intuitive to explicit, I put together my point of view on what core values form the foundation for great design. While none of what follows is necessarily ground breaking, I have found the exercise of collecting my thoughts and sharing them with my team to be very unifying and motivating. We use these pillars to challenge ourselves to create our best work, and to ask for what we need in order to do it.
Design is all about people. Solving problems for people, creating new opportunities for people, and adding value and joy to their lives. If teams do not have a meaningful understanding of the people they are designing for, they will not create successful products.
At ShopRunner, we have two very different customer groups: shoppers and retailers. To better understand their context, needs, and wants, we spend considerable time and energy with both our members and our retail partners, in the form of interviews, surveys, and feedback sessions.
Design requires equal emphasis on convergent and divergent thinking. A designer’s first idea is almost never their best idea. It’s critical that design teams make time for exploring possibilities and using their imaginations. Just as important, teams need an unbiased method to narrow their ideas to the best solution.
Sometimes a designer easily knows which of their ideas is strongest by the end of their exploration. Other times, they will bring in a teammate to help weigh pros and cons. A step further, they can use testing tools to get user feedback quickly. And in other cases, the team can launch a live test to narrow to the right solution. The more teams approach design experimentally, the better intuition they will build as designers.
Building products takes the coordination of many different skill sets, and therefore many different people. Problems with a final product—like confusing controls, buggy features, or misleading marketing—usually mirror the problems with the team that built them. It takes exceptional teamwork to create successful products.
Our teams at ShopRunner follow what we call the EDP structure: an Engineer, Designer, and Product Manager lead a development team. Designers at ShopRunner must build trust with both their immediate EDP team and their fellow designers. Teamwork can also manifest in shared standards, such as the set of patterns and components in our Design System.
I created this skill framework to have conversations with designers about their strengths and interests. At ShopRunner we look for generalists—designers that can take a product all the way from research to delivery. The role requires a broad range of skills, and it’s unreasonable to expect any given designer to have deep experience in every area. I’m a huge believer in growth mindset, and try to emphasize that the only thing between unskilled and skillful is experience.
