The design world loves to create heroes. Worse still, it likes to say these heroes work alone absent of anyone else around them.
There’s Jonny Ive, the Man Who Did All Of Apple’s Comeback Designs. No one talks about the team Jonny Ive had. It’s all about the hero, not the team.
Not only is this hero-worship wrongheaded, it’s not how things really work, not in my experience. Solo designers always suffer in places where they don’t have feedback from other designers. And the so-called heroes are usually the public (white male) face of a group of people working together.
Design is, fundamentally, about community.
Before I launch into this, let me say that “design is a team sport” has
been misused to suggest that the ENTIRE organization should be doing design work. And by ENTIRE I mean “the devs should be making design decisions” or “the whole company does design reviews.”
I do believe involving the entire organization is a good thing — another set of eyes, another perspective from a non-designer has saved my bacon more than once in my career. But at the end of the day, it’s up to the designer (and the design leaders) to find the signal in the noise they need to amplify. The designer needs to learn what ideas to push back on, and they need to identify when the “inclusive” process has turned into design by committee or design by HIPPO[1]. To deliver on the outcomes we’re expected to deliver on, we need to own the design decisions, not a developer, not a CEO, not a board member. That’s our job. Just as decisions on go-to-market or dev stack belong to the business and the engineering team (respectively), decisions on the nuances of design belong to the design team.
Let me offer an alternative to “design is a team sport”: Design is a
community and part of a community. As a community of designers in an organization, you will take inputs from the larger community of the organization (e.g. Product, Engineering), interpret them, and decide how to use the new information. Design’s community culture must be nurtured while participating in the larger community’s culture because you cannot create a thriving community without understanding the larger community, not unless you want to design in a vacuum that delivers no value in the end to the users that need it.
Teams create hierarchies. In design you have specialization creating these hierarchies; the researchers band together, designers band together, and the content folks band together. The roles get leveled in corporate systems so everyone knows who the leads are and who the juniors are. And roles within hierarchies can become rigid, especially in corporate environments that culturally demand those hierarchies. If you don’t guard against this in your team, that rigidity will hurt your team’s ability to innovate, iterate, and question. Remember, organizations already want pecking orders, so deference to rank and appeal to authority are always lurking, and in a design environment the threat of groupthink is ever-present.
And back to an earlier point: I’ve had my ideas improved or even re-thought by people who are not designers. Similarly, as someone whose user researcher skills get regularly looked down on by people who love to point to their advanced degrees, I’ve found that my perspective has helped researchers improve and re-think their work. It’s not the position or the job title that’s important; what’s important is using the conversation between all the roles and perspectives to drive things forward.
And that’s what got me thinking about Total Football.
Here’s the Ted Lasso explanation (NSFW):
And here’s the safe for work version: Until the early 70s, soccer (football outside of the US) had rigid definitions for each position on the field. A defender would defend but would never be involved in an offensive play, much less score. That wasn’t their role.
Along came coach Rinus Michels at Ajax FC (and later the Netherlands national team) who upended soccer/football as we knew it with Total Football, a fluid gameplay strategy that exploited the rigidity of the other team to score with abandon.
The one thing to remember about Total Football is you play the ball, not the position. There are still positions: Players better at defense play in the back, players better at offense play in the front. But you aren’t rooted to a zone, or a section of the field; you use your skills where they’re most suited at the moment based on where the ball, and the opposing players are. If you leave your so-called “zone,” another player will move in to take your spot.
And you pass the ball. A lot. By passing, you make the other team move around and make them vulnerable to an attack. If you’re a defender with the ball and you see how you can exploit the vulnerability to score… you do it. You don’t wave down the offensive minded players, you just do it.
How does a “total football” design team look? You have researchers, you have designers, you have content people and visual artists and project managers. That doesn’t change. What does change is that people are not rigidly anchored to their titles. You work the problem based on what you know and see. You give input. You help move things forward. The problem gets passed around, not locked in the head of a designer or a researcher for far too long.
Sometimes that means you have designers directly involved in research. Sometimes that means you have researchers reviewing designs. Sometimes that means the project manager is the one who points and asks, hey, why not do it that way?
And now you’re working the problem, not the position. The team, together, owns the problem and the solution, not just individuals on the team.
To make it work, you need to build the right team. They have to communicate really well — and will learn to do that better as they work together. They need to lay aside their egos and title hangups. Even though they are the authority on design, they are not the only smart person in the room (and shouldn’t be).
We’ve reached a crossroads in product design. The last decade has been about specialization — user research, content strategy, content design, design ops, design systems. As the post-COVID boom in design turned into a bust, many orgs turned to hiring generalists to maximize their shrinking budgets; this has left a lot of design specialists high and dry in a terrible job market.
And as this has happened, the so-called “AI” revolution has been working to take away the one thing designers have full control over — the pixels. The loss of control is scaring the industry. We’re all afraid of our jobs getting automated away, and some people are (hilariously) starting to argue that design needs to be less about the pixels and more about understanding the real problems that lead to those pixels getting put on the screen. (Hilariously because, well, it’s what most of us designers have been doing for our entire careers; Figma [and its predecessors] made our jobs look pixel and mockup centric, reinforcing stereotypes held by some in Product and Engineering.)
I am an unapologetic design generalist, though there are areas I know to stay away from. (Visual design, you are my forever nemesis.) Being a generalist means you may never be an absolute genius at everything, but you at least can move fluidly between the various disciplines, speak the right languages, and have a broader base of knowledge to pull from in the sticky moments.
The future of design will need more fluidity. The ability to be flexible, to be comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, and to seek breadth and depth will be what sees us into this next era of AI-infused design. The T-shaped and comb-shaped designer[2] never went away, but in a time like this we need to cross train more.
Play the ball, not the position.
Being able to engage the problem as a team means having everyone working the problem, and it means working solutions can’t stay in the hands of one person and their fear of how people will respond.
It requires a more fearless designer. It requires people taking initiative and stepping up as the needs and the opportunities arise.
Teams that work like this build resiliency, trust, and knowledge as teams, not as collections of individuals.
The day of the design hero is over, just as the day of the coding hero is. AI can handle being the hero now; we can focus on working together.
[1] Highest Paid Person in the Organization
[2]“ T-shaped designer” is a concept that arose in the 2000s of designers who had one strong skill alongside more basic knowledge of other skills; they could do most design tasks OK while being very strong in a set of subtasks. “Comb-shaped designer” is a T-shaped designer strong in multiple skills.
