Chapter 3
Crowning More than One Queen
5 min read
Managing a design organization - whether a team, agency, or department - is like an endless chess game. And let's be honest: that's also part of the fun.
As a manager, you have the board laid out in front of you, and your designers are the pieces. Each one has its own unique and distinct abilities, but all serve the same goal. The better you "play" by leveraging the best qualities of each designer to make the smartest moves, the more effective, efficient, and impactful your design organization will become.
Let's extend the analogy: On a chessboard, several pieces specialize in a particular action. Each does one thing, but does it perfectly. The bishop moves diagonally, the rook moves vertically and horizontally, and the knight moves in a highly specific L - shape.
Each side also has two generalist pieces: the king and the queen. The king is a limited generalist - it can do almost everything, but only in a small way. The queen, on the other hand, is a powerful generalist. She can do nearly everything without limitations.
Now, back to the heart of our discussion. If, as a manager, you had to choose which pieces to place on your board - either a board full of knights, bishops, or rooks, or a board full of queens, the choice would be simple: a board full of queens. The queen is a strong generalist; she can do almost everything at the highest level. Why limit yourself to horizontal and vertical movement or diagonal movement alone?
But here is the catch: the queen can't move like a knight!
On a board full of queens, you'll never be able to reach, in a single move, the unique positions that only a knight can reach. The knight's specialty is exceptional and, therefore, a necessity.
With a team composed of strong generalist designers, you'd have an excellent team that offers you, as a manager or design ops leader, nearly infinite possibilities. But it will always be "nearly." You'd be missing that edge - the designer with specialized skills who can challenge the rest of the team, demonstrate that there are still new skills to acquire and new areas to grow in. Those experts - essential today and likely to become a competitive advantage for any organization in the future - are the ones who push boundaries. They are indispensable, yet it is no longer sustainable to build a design organization made up solely of such "knight designers," as many organizations still do today.
Before I conclude, it's important to clarify that I'm looking at this from a macro-level, almost instrumental perspective. Of course, there's no such thing as a perfect generalist, just as there are very few truly specialized designers who can only do one thing. Naturally, every design organization has its own unique needs, and the distribution of skills does not solely dictate the quality of a team.