I’ve been asked lately over the holidays: what do I typically do as a middle manager on a design team, when it comes to my day-to-day tasks? Well, it tends to vary quite a bit across the days of a week given the dynamic demands & pressures of a mid-growth stage startup. Yet, while reflecting across my most common tasks/activities over the past year, I’ve noticed they generally fit into a mix of four basic types of work that I engage in, with different impact goals.
Tactical work: This is fairly straight-forward — it involves necessary production & delivery of artifacts, from pixel designing in Figma (e.g., while a designer is out, or extra help due to scale/complexity), to creating slide decks for meetings/reviews, or evaluating artifacts from others for feedback (e.g., research synthesis or workflow diagrams). If I’m facilitating a workshop there’s often pre-work and post-work, such as translating rough, messily generated stickies into something nicely formatted to be broadly consumed.
The impact is delivery for some key goal or deadline. Just get it done. ✅
Operational & administrative work: This tends to be the bulk of any middle manager’s job — for better and for worse! 🙃 This spans a range of activities including design and/or research operations, preparing for design team rituals, project management tasks, sending & reading status updates, cross-functional comms & coordinations (read: playing calendar Tetris to find blocks of time for workshops, which is not easy! 😆). And don’t forget standard, necessary HR-based admin tasks in Workday or Lattice such as granting approvals/declines (e.g., vacay, expenses, etc.), and preparing for performance reviews or career conversations. Plus, there’s software management — such as granting seats/licenses (like, “Does Larry in Accounting really need a FigJam seat?” 😅 ), securing budget approvals, or working with the Procurement and IT teams on contract renewals.
The impact of such work is foremost about enablement, to provide the scaffolding for others to do their jobs effectively — and to succeed. 🙌🏽 I like to think of this work as the essential “backstage ops” behind the curtains, so that the actors (or my designers, their peers, etc.) can perform capably on stage in the spotlight. ⭐️
Strategic work: Ahhh, the fun stuff — it’s typically the aspiration to do more of this work, to influence what’s coming next on the horizon, right? 😁 My experience has been that the rhythms for “strategic work” can fluctuate each quarter, as discovery streams or northstar efforts ebb & flow for projects as their phases evolve. Or critical product strategy sessions might be planned, where I’m “invited into the room” to provide a perspective, along with other design & research managers. I do include quarterly planning as part of strategic work, which has a companywide regular cadence, in terms of defining and assessing OKRs for the pods/teams/domains under my purview — and ensuring measurable links to strategic priorities.
I’ve found it’s useful to remember that strategy is not always “grand”. Strategic work can, and often does, manifest in mundane or subtle ways — such as customer panels, scenario sketches/storyboards, speculative conversations with cross-functional leaders, and so forth. They might not be formally titled as “strategic” — so, savor those serendipitous situations, and lean into their long-term potential impact, shaping plans where possible. 🔮
Relational work: This kind of work is perhaps the most important of all, since the ultimate value/impact of being a middle manager is predicated upon relationships with the people themselves 🙌🏽 — supporting them, influencing them, coaching them, empathizing with them, achieving alignment with them, and so forth. For me, this relational work is done via sincere, humanistic, transparent conversations with cross-functional peers and my direct reports, typically as 1:1’s over Zoom with video on, to enable authentic dialogue. Creating such spaces is vital. I regard these calls as valuable moments of connecting with each other — whether it’s for understanding someone’s perspective, exchanging feedback for mutual growth, or simply sharing some human vibes (e.g., rant, cry, laugh). It can be healthy to have those moments too!
The impact of this important effort & time investment could be simply transactional political capital, but more generously it enables mutual trust-building with collegial value that pays forward later, particularly in heated moments of conflict or resource/priority contentions. 😌
Those are the four main types of work I perform; so, the trick has been trying to find an effective balance! 😬 Sometimes it seems I’m way overloaded on HR admin tasks, or I’m just itching to do more tactical work to feel I’m having real impact. What then is the right balance? Mathematically having each type be allocated 25% spread across every week sounds logical… but totally unrealistic. 😆 It really depends upon what provides personal satisfaction, activates professional development/paths for growth, and enables team/company success to move forward, per stated priorities & goals. And keeping a dynamic balance by flexibly adjusting along the way!