Craft Your Leadership Plan with These 5 P's

Recently, a head of design shared with me how their UX metrics work was being taken up by their product management partners, to be placed on their dashboards. She shared how this upset her team, and, in digging into it with her, I realized it was because they'd defined themselves by this work, and weren't sure what next to work on. So, we talked about developing a robust quality framework, which this team could own.

Design leaders need an agenda, a specific point of view on the change they'd like to see. But an agenda is insufficient. There needs to be a plan to realize that agenda. Without a plan, the team treads water, overwhelmed by inbound requests, and uncertain what meaningful initiatives they could undertake next.

A few times in my Thought Partnership work with heads of design, I've scribbled on my whiteboard a rough leadership plan to give shape to what we've discussed, like this:

Seeing this pattern repeat spurred me to architect a more formal framework that can be used by design leaders to structure their thinking, and communicate with others the steps needed to realize their agenda.

Components

Your Agenda. The change you seek, captured in a sentence or two. This is the destination, and the elements of the plan are the itinerary.

The order of the 5 Ps is intentional, in that they tell a story.

People. Anything to do with team members, roles, practices. People goes first because they are the foundation for any leadership effort.

Programs. The initiatives, the discrete activities the team will engage in to realize that agenda. People is the "Who," and Programs are the "What."

Process. This is the "How." It can be adopting or improving methods and approaches (dual-track agile, product discovery, critique), or establishing team norms (how meetings work; requiring cross-functional goal alignment).

Performance. In conducting these Programs and following these Processes, what impact will this team have? How is it measured?

Positioning. Originally this was called "Communication," but I needed a P-word. I actually prefer Positioning, because it suggests an outcome for that communication—how is the team positioned within the organization? What are the teams 'talking points'? How are they shared?
It's last, because it relies on the outcome of the prior components to have a story to tell. And, I make this an explicit track, because too often design leaders neglect (or even dismiss) this kind of effort, thinking the work should speak for itself.

Stages. Across the top are three blanks, to be filled with progressing timelines. Think of them as "near-term," "medium-term," and "long-term." I don't specify these because the time it takes to enact the plan varies based on organization. Smaller teams and companies may be able to break it up in 3 month chunks. For larger teams, each stage may take a year. Also, the blanks allow flexibility, such that each phase could last a different length.

Drafting the Plan

All that's left is to fill out the plan. Start with what's top of mind when it comes to your agenda. Then, you could start with People in Stage 1 and go right, but you could also start with Performance if there are specific success measures to hit by certain times, and then build back from that in terms of People, Programs, and Process to drive to that outcome.

There will be dependencies or connections worth tracking. Holding off on building a new career framework until you've established the new practices of Design Ops and Content Design, and then using that framework to clarify the role of the Design Architect. Unifying the Design System in the first stage, and then start measuring design system adoption in the second. Scorecard heuristic evaluations in the first stage, connecting those scorecards to business value in the second, and then having impact stories and performance dashboards in the third.

This plan should be built with your team, discussed and refined with your cross-functional partners, and run by your immediate leadership. And then should be revisited every three-to-six months to see how closely things are going to plan, revising as necessary.

There's always more work to do than there are people to do it. This planning process allows the UX/Design team to have an intentional voice in their work, to control some of their destiny by carving out time for these important and impactful initiatives. Without it, teams find themselves in a reactive mode to other people's wishes, and never advancing their own agenda.