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Today, in 5 Minutes or Less, you’ll Learn

• The relationship structures a design team can play to the more prominent tech. company it supports

• The pros and cons of each relationship structure and their impact on creative leaders and their teams

• How to apply this and identify the relationship structure that will best suit your goals, skills, and ambitions for your career

Design and its Relationship to Tech.

Creative teams play a vital role in helping businesses succeed. They are responsible for developing customer-informed, data-driven, innovative products and services, designing user-friendly interfaces, and creating visually appealing branding. However, the relationship between cross-functional design teams and the larger businesses they support can vary greatly.

According to Prof. Sabine Junginger, there are four relationship structures a design function can play with the more significant business it supports—separate, peripheral, central, and integrated.

Separate Relationship

It occurs when the business employs contractors to solve creative problems, such as designing a new user interface for a mobile app. or creating a new visual identity.

Pros: Separate
A separate relationship is excellent if you are a freelancer or run a design agency that contracts creative people to businesses on a project basis. You have some autonomy to set your hours and rate of pay. The work is varied, and you build a portfolio to attract new clients.

Cons: Separate
Finding consistent work can be a struggle. Relationship building with clients or your agency is critical to fulfilling your pipeline. You work alone and don’t have the support of being part of a larger design team.

Peripheral Relationship

A peripheral relationship is when a company wants to take a product to market or build a customer base and requires a designer to work in-house to create a specific project. It might hire an individual with prototyping, user research, and product design skills to do this work.

Pros: Peripheral
You may work directly with a business leader or co-founder to shape the direction of a product and have a measurable impact on helping the company achieve its goal of higher reach and profitability.

Cons: Peripheral
You will wear many hats, work many hours, and possibly burn out. Your boss will likely change as the company grows or gets acquired, and your access to power may change.

Central Relationship

A central relationship occurs when product designs are used to unify products and services across an organization, enabling the company to break into new markets or acquire other companies. You might be developing a new design system for the company’s products, working with engineers to implement new design features, and conducting user research to understand users' needs.

Pros: Central
As a leader, you foster collaboration and teamwork and provide your team with guidance, mentorship, and career support.

As an individual contributor, you deliver research, prototypes, concepts, and designs informed by quantitative data and customer insights and deliver product experiences that help meet business needs.

Cons: Central
To be an effective leader, you must manage cross-functional partners and senior leaders, removing you from your familiarity and love for leading your teams and the personal fulfillment of doing creative hands-on work.

As an individual contributor, your output will be obsolete and replaced with optimized iterations or competitive alternatives within a year or two of creating it. To remain relevant to business, you need to keep your portfolio and technical skills up to date constantly.

Integrated Relationship

An integrated relationship is when design methods and practices, sometimes known as design thinking, are applied across all company parts across a wide range of organizational problems to build integrated solutions. Integration only happens with executive sponsorship of creative teams.

An example of a creative executive sponsor IS CEO Brian Chesky at Airbnb. He has a degree in industrial design and worked as a designer at several startups before starting Airbnb.

Integrated relationships also occur when a CEO and the Chief Design Officer collaborate. For example, Jony Ive and Steve Jobs had a close working relationship based on mutual respect, trust, and a shared vision for design at Apple.

Pros: Integrated
In an Integrated relationship, you are part of a talented design team with a high measurable quality bar. You have a voice in the design process and are encouraged to collaborate with stakeholders to create world-class products. You push the boundaries of design, take risks, and give and receive recognition for your creative work.

Cons: Integrated
The need to constantly exceed expectations can lead to a lot of pressure, making it hard to maintain a healthy work-life balance. It can lead to a competitive environment of top talent, which is stressful and makes it challenging to feel secure in your job. Expectations run high; I worked as a designer and design manager for Apple and an executive leader at Meta.

How to Apply This

As a creative leader working in tech, your team's organizational relationship with the business it supports can affect your career trajectory, leadership impact, and overall job satisfaction.

The best relationship for you will depend on your career goals, personality, and risk tolerance. A separate design function may be a good fit if you want autonomy and variety.

If you want to impact a product or service directly, a peripheral or central design function to the business may be a better choice.

If you want to be part of a talented team and have a tangible impact on the company, an integrated design function may be the best option.

No matter which relationship structure you choose, finding a company that values design and clearly understands how design methods help achieve its business goals is essential.

The Short of It

By asking the right questions during the job interview process, you can better understand the company's culture and the value of design within the organization.

Understanding the complex dance your creative team will have with the larger businesses before onboarding will set you and your teams up for success.

That’s it for this week!

Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future? Just shoot me a DM or an email.

With ❤️ from Sally

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