Smashing Podcast Episode 62 With Slava Shestopalov: What Is Design Management? — Smashing Magazine

The Smashing Podcast's 62nd episode turns to a question that rarely gets a straight answer: what does a design manager actually do? Vitaly Friedman talks with Slava Shestopalov, a designer and design manager who has worked at Alex and Bolt, about how the role differs from design itself and why so few people see the difference coming.

From journalism to design management

Shestopalov did not set out to be a designer. He studied journalism, and it was during a practice placement at the press department of his local branch of the Ministry of Emergencies — writing about accidents in the Cherkasy region and photographing them — that he first opened CorelDRAW and laid out his first page. He calls himself a self-taught designer, with no systematic design education and a lot of early work he would rather not revisit. A turning point came when an art director handed him Design for Non-Designers, which gave him the basics of composition, contrast and alignment; more books on design, business and management followed, along with progressively more complex projects.

He moved to Berlin three years ago and now lives there with his wife. Alongside his design work, he writes about UX and makes medieval-themed UX memes, and he is speaking at SmashingConf Freiburg in September 2023.

A deliberate but only partly answered case for management

Shestopalov's own move from lead designer to design manager in 2019 was driven by curiosity, not by a belief that management is the only way forward. He also questions how far the label fits: design management is not the same as product or engineering management, because job descriptions still treat domain knowledge and hard skills as essential alongside managerial competence. The proportion of management grows as you climb the hierarchy, so at his level the shift was not dramatic.

The harder transition, he says, was from senior designer to lead designer, when other people's responsibilities became his own. Direct orders are not an option in the modern workplace, and authoritarian styles no longer function, so a lead has to find gentler ways of working that respect people as individuals while still meeting business goals and team KPIs.

What the job actually contains

The most common surprise for new design managers is that their expectations were wrong. Design communities do a great deal of mentoring and knowledge-sharing; in Ukraine, where formal education lags behind the profession, community learning is the norm, and Shestopalov sees the same habit across Western Europe. People assume a design manager simply scales that activity up. It is not even the largest part of the job.

What they find instead includes:

• hiring, and being responsible for the hire rather than just checking a candidate's hard skills in a technical interview — a decision you then live with, because firing is neither easy nor the right first response to a person you are meant to develop and help grow
• onboarding and adaptation during that early period
• retention work: resolving problems when employees are unhappy with their situation, their compensation, or their manager
• salary, compensation and bonuses
• team building, trust and relationships
• performance management and knowledge assessments
• such things as salary, compensation, bonuses, team building and trust, performance management, knowledge assessments

How much design remains varies with the company and its structure. In a small organisation where processes are loosely formalised and there are few reports, a manager can still spend 50% or even 70% of their time designing. In large companies, management expands to fill the available time and the old way of designing disappears.

Design itself does not vanish, though; it changes altitude. Moving pixels to balance a button is design, but so is building a customer journey map or a service blueprint with stakeholders from other departments — a larger picture of a product, a service, or an experience spanning several of a company's services. Remaining design work tends to become less digital and more organisational.

T-shapes, We-shapes and the question nobody settles

Asked what shape a designer should be, Shestopalov declines the silver bullet. He sees the T-shape as a good idea, with one caveat: people disagree on how substantial the horizontal bar is, and reasonable people can differ on whether that breadth is shallow or merely decent knowledge. This is the idea behind the We-shape designer, essentially a different representation of the same structure — deep specialisation in what you love, plus a minimum required fluency in the rest of the profession. He likens it to any other specialist: a surgeon or a financial expert has favourite topics and an obligation to know the whole field. A designer need not match a dedicated UX researcher's depth, but knowing about UX research and being able to do some of it is fair to expect, just as basics of design help researchers collaborate better. His larger point is that long debates about job titles and abbreviations are unusually designer-centred — time most other professions do not spend arguing about the name of the job.

Why the world is still full of bad experiences

Algorithms, services and industry experience have improved, yet interactions with public services and insurance companies remain poor. Shestopalov's explanation: nothing went wrong. The world has grown more complex, but the people in it have not changed, and neither has the brain they are running on. Not everyone is excited about their job, good people have low-quality periods, and emotional decision making does not disappear just because a hundred prioritisation frameworks are available. Some people also turn modern methods to self-interested ends, using design thinking and workshops — coloured sticky notes included — to push through their own ideas rather than to discover anything. Unethical business models and dark patterns flourish for the same reason. Human variability, in his framing, is not a bug: designers create for humans, and they are humans too.

He treats this as the operating premise for design management: design operates in a context shaped by imperfect people, and managers work in the same conditions.

On culture, red flags and hiring for consistency

Culture, in Shestopalov's view, is like user experience or gravity: it exists whether or not it has been written down, so red-flag hunting aims at the wrong target. Because culture is effectively inexorable, the practical approach is prevention — understand what it is, strengthen it, and communicate it accurately outward.

Honesty matters more than comfort. He has worked in cultures he describes as harsh that nonetheless helped him grow, because he knew what to expect and had the inner readiness to learn and resist. The real problem is a mismatch between the external message and the lived reality. Where a company advertises wellbeing and mindfulness while running permanent deadline panic and contradictory stakeholder demands, the resulting disappointment is not the candidate's fault. He also argues internally inconsistent companies are poorly served by their own framing: one previous team concluded its real offer was something like a university, attracting people who want to grow fast — more practice, less perks, a plain office, and the freedom to take responsibility rather than wait for assignments — which helped match the right people to the right environment.

Across many teams, Shestopalov also notices a recurring split: one group watches the clock and leaves on time, another fills Slack with GIFs and enthusiasm, and warmth and coldness collide. There is no general answer. One solution is to hire people consistent with the dominant culture. A proactive core team can accept more quiet, schedule-attentive colleagues who support it in a calmer way — but they should not directly resist it, and never should be the inverse of a team's spirit.

He has also revised an earlier one-sided view. His earlier judgment that designers should all be proactive, highly motivated and quick to take responsibility ignores the trade-off: people who are passionate produce work when the passion is present, but struggle when it fades. Those who are calmer and more attentive to work–life balance are more persistent and cope better when everything around them is falling apart. Neither profile is deficient. The work is to find people their right place.

On remote, hybrid and onsite setups, his answer is the same variable: culture, and therefore fit. Where the team runs on active networking and people join partly for the social fabric, offline work suits them; where autonomy is the norm, hybrid or remote can work perfectly well. He suggests the situation where a company has attracted people with opposing preferences is best handled before it arises — by hiring for fit, which is itself the reason large companies need defined processes. As organisations scale, homogeneity is impossible, so structure and some measure of regulation are the cost of keeping it functional.

The pattern of drift reminds him of a hiring-chain diagram and a piece of evolution: culture passes quietly from person to person as teams grow, and the accumulated distance between ends of that chain is what eventually forces leaders to formalise processes.

The Ukrainian design community, and the state of things in May 2023

Moving between two positions for the same team — Vitaly's migration from engineering to design and the slow drift between management, design and management-driven changes — has been covered here before in the shape of an organically messy career. Still watching careers evolve slowly and unexpected directions — much like a young biology fan studying land adaptation — has worked well for starting a new online venture.

Usually a shared online game after a long remote conversation is all that is required to notice these things; it worked well enough that Vitaly refers to himself, half-seriously, as a game-based design manager.

Shestopalov now coaches and continues to hire some designers, which is one way some design managers keep a hand in craft.

As the February 2022 invasion began, he finds, students and mentors have all kept their work patterns going.

On Shestopalov's account, Ukrainian designers are recognisable for a hunger for knowledge and for a high degree of self-organisation: they do not expect institutions to provide what they need, so they set up their own routes into the profession. His own generation deliberately planned careers during their university years rather than waiting until an employer handed them one. The trait is visible in how the community reacts to learning its trade: applying a design before its flaws are taught in more than one institution; generating locally-run or free courses and informal approaches such as in the game, rather than relying on universities that never caught up. He suspects it helps in crisis conditions too, partly because many people keep a plan B, C or even D in reserve. He adds a caveat about himself: he has not worked from a bomb shelter, has not seen study continue in shelters and stairwells himself, and speaks from Berlin rather than from inside the situation. He counts himself among those who feel at home both in Berlin and abroad.

• Connect with Slava on LinkedIn, and read his writing on Medium.
• From the same month in which this episode was published, Smashing Magazine collected an episode-focused reading list for designers, and published the following week's update along with related pieces.

AI, novelty and what remains worthwhile

Asked how he feels about AI-written messages that carry a ChatGPT flavour, Shestopalov is unmoved; the technology is simply the trend of the moment, just as NFT and blockchain were, and like every novelty it will follow the same adoption curve — peak excitement and broad application, then disillusionment and a comedown, then, finally, a stable plateau with genuinely strong use cases. Design sprints went the same way: people once applied them everywhere, including where the problem was too large or the culture lacked the trust and openness the method assumes, before settling into narrower, more appropriate use — at basically a similar level of frequency today.

He even keeps an old memory of the industry's more elaborate vocabulary choices, and he lists "UX Designer" instead, but is not sure the labels matter: where a designer turns out to have no relevant strong point, where they build design work they hate, where customers get low-quality work and teams do not trust each other, — none of that lowers the need for design.

On the subject of AI, his view is clear: if AI absorbs routine work, colleagues should welcome that, because those tasks are not what anyone values. What is left, and what gets harder, is the human factor in design. He sees his own effort as going into understanding people as they are, particularly how designers as humans can serve other people, and recommends the question to anyone working in design, UX and adjacent areas.