The Design GM
The General Manager (GM) role is typically one not held by designers and might feel mysterious. For sports fans, the role may be familiar as the person who runs a franchise; working closely with the head coach. The coach wins games with the roster assembled. The GM helps build that roster, deciding where to invest in talent and how to put the franchise in a position to keep winning. Those decisions shape what the coach has to work with long before the game starts.
In the world of business, the GM is usually responsible for the profit and loss (P&L) of a business area. Engineering, product, and design teams may report to them directly or through a dotted-line relationship. Their decisions reach across those disciplines: what to build, where to invest, and which opportunities to pass on. They have to make those choices with the whole business area in mind.
The GM acts like a CEO for their business area and ultimately responsible for the outcomes. If a product launches and customers don’t find enough value to pay for it, the work continues. The GM has to help figure out what’s missing and decide what to do about it.
As with investors and operators, few GMs come from a design background. Bruce Bell during his time at Square is probably the most known GM coming from a Design Background. Most come from a business background, and although there are business-oriented designers, I’d wager that most designers don’t care to get too tied into the business.
I think there’s an opportunity here for designers who want that responsibility. Understanding customers, connecting the parts of an experience, and making trade-offs can all help you run a business. The stretch is applying those skills beyond the design team and staying accountable for what happens after a decision is made.
That’s the Design GM: someone who brings a design background to owning a business area. It could be a career path, or a mindset you start practicing in the role you already have.
The GM mindset
You don’t need the title to practice a GM mindset. Start by taking responsibility for how your area of the business performs. For a designer, that means following the work into three areas: business outcomes, operations, and talent.
Business outcomes
Owning a P&L means being responsible for revenue, costs, and profit in your area of the business. You have to make trade-offs about where to invest, what to stop, and whether growth is worth what it costs to deliver.
For a GM of self-serve, that could mean following customers from signup through their first purchase and renewal. A better onboarding experience should help people find value and give them a reason to become paying customers. You stay close enough to the results to know whether it worked.
Operations
Operations is how the business gets work done. Quarterly business reviews, planning, and report-outs should help the team decide what matters, who’s responsible, and what needs to change. A recurring meeting should earn its place on the calendar.
There’s design work in how those decisions get made. If a customer problem keeps bouncing between teams, help them agree on an owner and a next step. Look for where work gets stuck and make it easier for people to move it forward.
Talent]
Talent includes hiring, developing, retaining, and managing the performance of the people doing the work. A GM also has to think about the mix of skills the business needs and where the gaps are.
Like a sports GM, you’re building a roster. Coming from design, you need to recognize and develop great work across disciplines, including ones you’ve never practiced yourself. That takes curiosity about what your colleagues do and what they need to succeed.
Gaining experience
There isn’t a single, well-marked path from designer to GM. You can start building the experience by taking responsibility for a problem that reaches beyond design.
Operate with high agency
Pick a problem affecting customers, even if it isn’t on the design roadmap. Bring the right people together, propose a next step, and agree on how you’ll measure progress. High agency includes making the follow-through your responsibility: checking the results, surfacing what isn’t working, and helping the team adjust.
Build relationships with customers and partners
Spend time with customers beyond the research session. Learn why they buy, what slows adoption, and what would make them leave. Build relationships with the people who sell, support, and help deliver the product, including external partners. Those conversations connect what customers need with what it takes to serve them.
Own your area
A head of design can build GM experience by setting priorities, managing a budget, developing people, and connecting the team’s work to business results. The practice starts with decisions you can own today.
Choose a scope you can be accountable for, whether that’s onboarding, a growth initiative, or a small product. Agree with your partners on the outcome and the decisions you own, then stay with it after launch.
Operate like an owner before you get the role
Nobody will give you permission to take on a GM role. You earn a shot at it through the outcomes you deliver.
Replit was where I got to go beyond design and own marketing as well, allowing me to be the DRI for the self-serve funnel. It was the amalgam of my previous career experience that enabled me to take a crack at it: performance marketing at ExactTarget, plus brand and growth at Webflow.
Have a stake in your design
Getting your designs shipped is only the beginning. Practicing extreme ownership means you care about business outcomes: customer value that leads to revenue. There is knowing the business, and then there is changing the business. Even business-oriented designers don’t all practice ownership. They may have strong business acumen, but that doesn’t guarantee they’ll push for outcomes. In many cases, they face pushback from cross-functional stakeholders.
As I tell my heads of design, it’s time to go from appeasing stakeholders to being the stakeholder.
The GM role is often held by people with MBAs, people in product, and operators. This was once true of the product manager role. We are now seeing more designers and people from other disciplines become product managers, and they can become GMs too.
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