The emerging figure of the 'Hands-On Lead'
What this design profile is and is not
As the current financial climate continues to shift, we are seeing more and more job ads for hybrid design lead roles, particularly in companies with 50 to 200 employees. These roles often require a senior or senior-plus designer to act as a lead as well. While some might expect me to vent about this trend, I am actually a strong believer in the hybrid profile and a huge advocate for leadership with a strong expert background. In fact, some companies, like Shopify, have even developed a 3-lane experience path that aligns with my own experience and beliefs.
As someone who is a crafter at heart and feels comfortable in the in-between space of the craft expert and the people manager, I have thought a lot about this hybrid profile.
I’ve been always been concerned about losing my hands-on superpower and if I stayed too far away from the expert path. However, I have found that visual thinking and storytelling are some of the designer's superpowers, and I have been able to incorporate these into my leadership roles. You can check out some of my portfolio leadership cases to get a better idea of what I am talking about.
Setting realistic expectations for a ‘hands-on lead’
First and foremost, the concept of available time. Craft needs time and management needs time. If a hands-on lead designer spends 50% of their time on each of them, they will be half-fast. Additionally, 50% is never truly accurate due to context switching, meetings, and time Tetris.
If your goal is to "speed-up deliveries" by hiring a hands-on lead, you may be disappointed at first. While these individuals may be incredibly fast at craft and quite effective at management, the risk of burnout is incredibly high if they do both things at 100%. As a good head of product or design, you do not want this scenario.
What you can expect from this profile is a foundational brick on which your company's design culture will develop. A hands-on lead can bring a unique perspective to the table, blending their expertise in craft with their leadership and management skills. This can help foster a more collaborative and innovative environment, and ultimately lead to better and faster design outcomes.
In summary, the emerging figure of the hands-on lead is not for every company or every individual. But for those who are comfortable with the in-between space of craft and management, it can be a highly valuable role. Companies should set realistic expectations for this profile and be prepared to support and develop these individuals to ensure they thrive in their roles.
Benefits of hiring a ‘hands-on lead’
This role combines the skills of a strategic thinker and an experienced designer, making them an instrumental tool for establishing the scaffolding of your design culture and future scale.
One of the key advantages of a hands-on lead is their ability to lead by example, facilitating design critics, establishing good practices and craft approaches that will train and elevate the skills of a design team. They can also hire key new profiles to the team, such as researchers, or ux writers, and set up basic guides for the process that will allow you to scale without incurring in (too much) design debt.
Risks of hiring a ‘hands-on lead’
It's important to note that this hybrid profile may not have enough time to be 100% part of a feature team, if you want to avoid the risk of burnout. As such, this role performs best with small teams of no more than 4 designers where can oversee core experience capabilities, such design systems, information architecture, etc, acting as the agglutinant for all the related feature teams.
If the hands-on lead is only focused on feature work and lacks the leadership side of mentoring, coaching, and stabilizing core decisions and processes for a group of designers, it can lead to frustration. To avoid this, it's crucial to discuss the desired scope of the role with the hands-on lead.
Why should you hire a ‘hands-on lead’?
They can bridge the gap between strategy and execution while training and elevating the skills of a design team. However, it's important to consider alternative options if your idea is to spare a headcount until you can afford it. It may be better to use agencies to boost or kick-off strategic projects until you can afford to have a well-rounded design structure.
How should you hire a ‘hands-on lead’?
If you don’t have director level design figures in your company, it's best to seek the help of an expert in design profiles, such as a talent agency. Even if you're a super savvy product or tech lead, it's always best to ask for expert consultancy about design profiles and let yourself get advised on the trade-off and options. It's better to invest in expert consultancy for a few hours than to fail a couple of times finding the right fit for this key profile and hinder several quarters.
How should you hire a ‘hands-on lead’?
For small to medium companies, the sweet spot for a hand-on lead is a design team of ideally 2 or 3 persons, where there is a need to establish the foundations for design scale, quality, and processes.
For larger organizations, this role is best suited for complex projects across different business areas, where a hand-on lead can spot inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and blind spots and deliver standards, patterns, by simplifying the chaos.
Summary
Overall, hiring a hand-on lead can bring immense benefits to your team and organization, and finding the right fit for this role can help establish the scaffolding for design culture and future scale.
