Toward a playbook for UX leaders

Abstract

over years of informed intuition. As a result, they may not have the most beautiful visuals or a prescriptive, templatized narrative worthy of peer judginess. Yet they have a case study, or a series of narratives of conflict and resolution with lessons (or rationale) brought back from the edge (or depth) of despair, for self-improvement or more—perhaps punctuated by some useful artifacts that do not take center stage, as in your typical portfolio. There just has to be a better way for a design leader to tell their rich and diverse story! Enter the playbook. I offer the playbook as a construct that helps UX leaders to convey their value and point of view beyond pretty images in a gallery. A playbook is grounded in methods and approaches developed from a) practical expertise and b) personal mannerisms (aka “style”) that come with years of experience tackling various situations. Together they form a distinctive statement of how you navigate ambiguity, wrangle complexity, and strive for value at the meta levels of vision, strategy, process, and culture. It’s not about artifacts wrapped into a convenient story, but rather about a set of plays that you can pull out of your pocket because you have seen that situation, or some variation thereof, before. As such, you can spark a productive dialogue on how to proceed with senior leadership members and thus assert your value as a UX leader in a very real way. Let’s dive into this playbook construct a bit more: • It’s inspired by American sports, in which coaches have a playbook of calls, strategies, and tactics for defensive or offensive maneuvers. They speak to a coach’s way of handling situations that happen again and again and again. It’s all based upon what they’re comfortable While applying for a UX manager position recently, I was asked to send in my portfolio along with the usual résumé/CV. It’s a rather perfunctory request, but that’s exactly it. It’s like some bodily reflex by the hiring staff, performed dozens of time daily, without thought. I was about to conform to this request, but I paused midway in my equally perfunctory response (“Of course, I’ll send over the link...”). This time, the rebel in me awoke, questioning: “Is a portfolio truly the best way to showcase my qualifications as a design leader?” Especially for one who is experienced and operating at a more meta level in a company, shaping strategy, process, and culture to enable good design to thrive? I wonder... Let’s take a step back. A typical UX portfolio is a compilation of visual evidence that forms a composite persuasive portrait, conveying the skills and capabilities of that individual, as a story of their work and career. It’s a material output that’s meant to be a statement of what has been made, in order to address a current hiring need, indicating how things may be if they hire that person. It’s a measure of one’s potential value based upon past progress packaged in a targeted way—which of course is no guarantee, but rather simply another ingredient in the candidate-evaluation mix. Yet what is considered de facto has evolved into a faulty, confined litmus test. For whatever reason; it’s nobody’s fault. Portfolios are now basically a firstround, pass-fail assessment to advance to further rounds of interviewing. Note: My bias against the portfolio construct is born out of the context of Silicon Valley of the past decade, which I’ve witnessed firsthand as both a hiring agent and a job candidate—it’s basically devolved into a simplistic dogand-pony show of enthralling visuals embellished by a rote templatized story of canonical UCD steps, with a sprinkling of business metrics and anecdotal skirmishes with pesky tech constraints. Is the portfolio following this template? Cue an arched eyebrow and hasty Slack DM to the hiring manager, before dashing off to a daily standup with the product team! Sigh. Yet we must contend with this construct, this mechanism of hiring, as designers mature and grow into leadership roles. So how do they tell that story effectively, and by what means? I’m not sure portfolios are the best way forward. Now, to be sure, the portfolio still has value for junior and midlevel designers seeking employment, especially for visual design and production graphics. The portfolio is a useful vehicle for showcasing one’s craftsmanship, with general process details and some reflections on what was learned. There are many lovely examples out there highlighted on social media. And they’re just fine for that—as long as they speak to the role expectations and the designer’s ability to address the demands with visual evidence shaped into a compact narrative. However, for someone pursuing UX leadership roles at the principal, architect, or managerial levels, I’d suggest the portfolio framed as such is not the best method to gauge one’s worthiness for those roles. For someone operating as such, they have transcended the grammars of design production toward the rhetorical arts of conversation and facilitation, proactively anticipating insights gleaned