Management framework

For leading a design team

Framework overview

This framework stems from my years of leading design teams across various organisations. It's a practical guide for managing designers, whether you're working in UX, product design, or service design. I've put this together for two reasons: to give leadership a starting point for tailoring management strategies, and as a personal checklist, making sure I cover all the bases of effective design leadership.

This framework integrates people-focused design team management with a maturity model. It covers talent management, team dynamics, organisational alignment, and leadership practices across four maturity levels. It provides a structured approach to assess, develop, and evolve design teams, adapting management strategies as teams grow from Emerging to Leading

This framework also has a toolkit of templates for every facet of design management. Templates applicable to the unique context of an organisation can be selected and adapted, removing the need to reinvent key methods, documents and ways-of-working from scratch.

1. Talent management

Recruitment and onboarding
When bringing new designers into the team, I am keenly aware that I am shaping the future of the experiences delivered to clients and customers. Aside from the skills and experience specific to the role, I seek to balance attitudes towards delivering craftsmanship and being an agent of change. I customise detailed templates for the first 30, 60 and 90 days to provide a transparent roadmap for onboarding.

Templates: Level-based interview guides, 30-60-90 day onboarding plan

Performance management
To manage performance effectively, I balance three key factors - the individual’s goals, success factors for the organisation, and growth directions in the design industry. I seek to define all of these as clearly as possible, in collaboration with partners and stakeholders, so that expectations for every level of the design team are understood clearly. With this clarity, it is easier to share timely and actionable feedback, supporting designers in growing and delivering real value.

Templates: Success factors matrix

Career development
Design careers rarely follow a straight line. I work with each team member to figure out where they want to go in the context of a shared skills matrix and career path model, even if that path leads them out of my team eventually. We identify areas where they need to grow, and I find opportunities for them to stretch their skills. Sometimes that means sending them to a conference, other times it's about giving them a project that pushes them out of their comfort zone. I love the process of supporting talented creative people in their growth journey!

Templates: Skills matrix, career path model, industry trends mapping

Mentoring and coaching
I've seen firsthand how powerful good mentoring can be. I try to match up junior designers with more experienced team members, but I also look for mentoring opportunities outside our immediate team. Design intersects with so many other disciplines, and I want my team to learn from a variety of perspectives. When I'm coaching, I focus on helping designers overcome specific challenges. Sometimes that means working through a tough project together, other times it's about navigating team dynamics or stakeholder relationships. The individualised approach is based on a shared expertise matrix, which I craft based on the needs of the organisation and the value that the design capability brings to the value proposition.

2. Team dynamics

Building team culture
A strong team culture doesn't happen by accident. I've learned it takes constant effort. Key to this is balancing informal interactions and spaces with structured events, for example weekly design reviews, monthly showcases, and quarterly learning events. Rituals like celebrating wins, sharing insights about users and business, and taking ownership of tools, frameworks and relationships on behalf of the design team strengthen the sense of belonging and contribution.

Templates: Team rituals calendar, review and showcase guidelines, team values canvas

Managing diversity and inclusion
Diverse teams create better solutions. It's not just about hiring people from different backgrounds - it's about creating an environment where everyone feels comfortable speaking up and sharing their unique perspective. As a leader, it is important to seek the discomfort of challenging opinions and perspectives, in order to find opportunities for the team to improve and reduce bias in process, deliverables, or mindset.

Templates: Inclusive design principles guide

Conflict resolution
In creative work, disagreements are inevitable. I use a principle-based approach to resolving conflict: rapid response, alignment to outcomes for the business and its customers, and a collaborative approach to solution finding. Leadership in conflict resolution involves both empowering team members with the skills and relationships they need to resolve conflict themselves, as well as providing escalation paths and confidence that they have active support within their team.

Templates: RACI matrix, experience strategy and metrics

Remote/hybrid team management
Managing a distributed design team comes with its own challenges and opportunities, needing more intentional communication and collaboration. I establish clear protocols to manage time zones, leverage tools to maximise asynchronous collaboration, and create dedicated virtual spaces for the design team. This structure ensures equitable participation, maintains team cohesion, and drives productivity regardless of physical location. Regular reassessment keeps the approach relevant and effective.

3. Organisational alignment

Integrating with business strategy
Design doesn't exist in a vacuum. I believe that design expertise holds the key to a sustainable business response towards disruptive change, by founding that response in the underserved needs and motivations of the audience. By bringing differentiated value to our clients and customers, learning from the feedback, and delivering high-quality experiences, we ensure business outcomes. In order to have this impact, the design team must become trusted partners in strategy, through visualising the strategy, making the strategy more resilient by anchoring it in user needs, facilitating collaborative decision-making, and translating strategy into tangible prototypes or models.

Templates: Business model canvas, value proposition canvas, BIZBOK framework and capability frameworks

Cross-functional collaboration
Delivering high-quality solutions needs seamless collaboration within and between teams. Designers have the facilitation skills that are key to enabling this collaboration, and design leadership is responsible for supporting designers in using opportunities to do this across organisational silos. This requires relationship building, shared expertise in collaboration methods, and an outreach program to understand the organisational challenges that will benefit from facilitated collaboration.

Templates: Stakeholder maps, agile-integration model, design engagement model

Advocating for design
Design advocacy amplifies the organisation’s ability to understand the needs and experiences of its audience, through support for the design team but also through adoption of design methods and mindsets across the organisation. I use a three-pronged approach - education, demonstration, and integration. Education in particular can be formal, through training courses I have developed, or informal, embedded in the design work done as part of the team. Integration includes building a network of allies who open up opportunities to apply design to organisational challenges.

Templates: Design maturity assessment, value stream map

4. Leadership practices

Delegation and empowerment
A roles-and-responsibilities matrix, customised for the organisation, helps everyone on the design team understand their areas of ownership and growth. The aim is to start with responsibilities that are roughly 70% within comfort zone, 20% are stretch assignments, and 10% are experimental, supporting growth, autonomy, and balanced workloads while maintaining clear accountability.

Templates: Responsibilities matrix, self-assessment model

Change management
The design team often finds itself at the leading edge of change, and has two key contributions in the context of change management - facilitating a structured approach to managing the change, and bridging the gap between internal objectives and user needs. Design leadership needs to integrate this expertise into the broader transformation by building and participating in the change leadership, facilitating collaborative translation of the challenge into a vision of the future, supporting the team in getting short-term wins, and learning from the roll-out of the change. Most importantly, design leadership needs to stay ahead of the curve by generating change rather than reactively responding to it.

Templates: 8-step change model worksheet, stakeholder engagement plan

Continuous learning and adaptation
Given the rapid evolution of design tools and methods, I encourage everyone to always be learning and experimenting, and regularly try out new design tools and methodologies. Where these bring clear benefit to efficiency, quality, or scale, I work to integrate these tools into the tooling pipeline, not just for the design team but for the broader workflow that these tools are part of. This often requires formal assessments of alternatives, security and compliance reviews, and budget planning.

Templates: Product development tooling pipeline, team skills heatmap

Stress management and work-life balance
Design work can be intense, and burnout is a real risk. I keep an eye out for signs of stress in my team, and aim to balance times of stressful delivery with engaging exploration. At times of continuous load, I have used a system of daily team check-ins to assess level of workload and stress, ensuring back-up for anyone who is overstretched.

Templates: Workload capacity planner