Thread by @berkun

1. Many leaders in organizations set up designers to fail.

They hire designers without understanding their value and what must be done for them to succeed. The opportunity is a lie when the truth is designers are involved too late and with too little power to ever succeed.

2. Hiring designers only to ignore them might be the cruelest kind of design theater. It enables a CEO to say "we have a great UX team" while in reality, they reward unqualified PMs and engineers for doing most of the designing.

3. What is never said openly is projects *already* have designers who have not agreed to hand over power.

Without explicitly redistributing that power, leadership has failed. They either are incompetent for not recognizing it's their job to do this or for failing to do it.

4. It's obvious the way it should be: Engineers, PMs and Biz folks are led, from above, to give power to designers, at least enough to make it true collaboration. They'd be rewarded for it and penalized for not doing it.

When this doesn't happen, it's obvious then who to blame.

5. Even something as simple as one Dir. of Engineering, or Dir. of PM, saying "let's empower them from day 1 this time" can work wonders. It's so small a thing. The CEO or VP can be asleep at the wheel and it can still succeed. But this is all too rare. Mystifying. Infuriating.

6. The peak catch-22 absurdity is when designers are blamed for being ineffective: "Well, you didn't influence the project as much as we hoped."

How on earth could anyone be effective at working uphill, outnumbered, behind enemy lines without any cover fire?

#setuptofail

7. This is a universal leadership problem: if the person doing the hiring is unfamiliar with the job they're hiring for, *by default* they're going to set them up to fail, unless they do the extra work to set them up to succeed.

8. Here is my checklist for a) learning if your boss is setting you up to succeed or to fail and b) what to do about it.

scottberkun.com/2018/set-up-to…