The shape of your design system team and the hierarchy it falls within can greatly impact the way you approach the work. A key role to the success of your program is the middle manager.
In most organizations, there are three hierarchical tiers of roles that need to be strong for a design system program to be sustainable. You are probably keenly aware of the individual contributors. These are the system designers and developers, the product managers, the content and QA folks. It’s also likely that you’re very aware of the executive champions, the check signers who provide air cover for our design system teams and work with other execs to make sure we have time and funding, even through difficult seasons.
The tier I’d like you to think about today sits between these. Sometimes these folks have director titles and sometimes they are leads.
They are the ones directly supporting the individual contributors on the DS team.
They are the ones responsible to the executive champions for the DS delivering on its promises.
They are the ones trying to manage the flow of information between the tactical and the strategic.
They are the ones often tasked with setting the vision for the system, even though they aren’t involved in the day-to-day crafting of that system.
This role is especially hard because the individual contributors they are supporting often report up through different leaders—there tend to be a lot of dotted lines on the org chart around the design system team. That means these folks are sometimes managing the work of people they haven’t collaborated with before, from a different part of the organization, and often with a different primary discipline. Having a solid person in this role can make or break your DS program.
The key to success for organizations with this structure is when that middle layer is deeply engaged with the system work.
Your executive leadership is essentially buying the benefits you promise a design system will deliver. Beyond that, they don’t dig in too deeply. Instead, they rely on the reports they receive from those middle folks. If you convince your execs that it’s possible to save money by working more quickly, they’ll sign a check to make it happen.
Your individual contributors are going to do their best to build something that allows reuse across the organization. They may have more or less experience, they may make some classic mistakes and have to refactor, but they will figure out how to technically implement a system that others in the org can use.
But those folks in the middle are the ones that need to be able to translate from the strategic to the tactical and back again. They’re the ones who hear what leadership really wants and cast the vision for what the system needs to be. That vision casting is the beginning of cultural change. It’s the ideal future state you can only reach if everyone agrees to value the same things, to make really good decisions in the minutia of each day.
When the people in the middle do their job well, the IC’s build stuff that offers the benefits the execs bought. When they don’t do their job well, it’s unlikely that the system program will last because it probably won’t deliver on its promises (no matter how good the assets are).
I believe the key to design system success for organizations with this structure is when that middle layer is deeply engaged with the system work. They need to truly know what’s happening tactically so that they can join that understanding with the strategic direction they’re getting from above. Only then can they cast the right vision. Only then can they work with the executives to align organizational incentives around a more systematic approach. Only then can the tactical team deliver the right things.
If you find yourself in this middle position, show up for your tactical team. If you are an IC, invite that middle layer into the weeds with you occasionally. If you’re an exec, ask the hard questions so you know whether your middle layer is truly paying attention to what’s happening.
If we are all aware of the criticality of this role, we can spur each other on toward a better approach!
