The rise of IC roles in UX and Product Design

And why you don’t need to be a design manager to be considered successful anymore

Thanks Austin for the picture.

There is nothing I hate more than bad managers who breathe down your neck as you’re trying to design something.

“I think it’s better if you put that button there” or “We should use orange for this graphic because it feels better” are just some of the comments that would make me want to grab my manager’s hand and make them do it themselves.

It feels even worse when your manager isn’t from a design background.

So with the fact that design managers do exist in the market, we would ideally love a dedicated spokesperson for the design team, right? Someone we can count on and someone who speaks the same language as we do.

Well, it turns out life, as usual, isn’t that simple.

Managers come in all shapes and forms, so sometimes it is a bit difficult to pin-point what traits exactly are bad and which are good because depending on the mixture of pros and cons you get, you will have very different conclusions on whether someone is a good manager or not.

Being a good manager is not easy, and it’s not a job everyone is suited for.

I do not wish to generalise, and this is purely from my own experience. So please don’t read this thinking what I think about management is true by default.

My experience with general managers

You would think from my introduction, I would automatically detest general managers who have little background about the design industry and what we do. Micro-managing is annoying regardless of background, but I’ve actually experienced it rarely from general management.

They have little knowledge of what we do as designers, and that was exactly why they tend to respect our authority as professionals in the space and lets us practice how we see fit, with occasional helpful inputs about how we can improve our productivity using project management principles.

However, because of their lack of knowledge in the space, they might have a tendency to cherry-pick processes and workflows they deem more efficient and…