Feature
Enterprise design has seen a wild few years.
Back in January 2020, just over 17,000 job postings existed for enterprise and experience design and enterprise architecture positions, according to ZipRecruiter. By January 2022, that number had ballooned to 104,208.
“Enterprise design or enterprise architecture leadership roles became more important after the pandemic, as companies confronted the need to accelerate their digital transformation and make their systems more efficient,” Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, told Reworked.
The key year for growth, said Pollak, was 2021. The next year, job postings for enterprise design positions began to drop, with current demand landing at under 15,000 in June 2023. Many large companies already have someone in that function, Pollak said, which can explain the decline. Still, she added, hiring remains resilient.
So, what does the head of enterprise design do?
What Is a Head of Enterprise Design?
According to Pollak, “enterprise design teams are responsible for adopting enterprise-level technological solutions, systems and organizational structures that allow them to operate quickly and efficiently, with targeted precision and with very little error.”
Andrew Lindsay, head of enterprise design and user experience at The Kraft Heinz Company, shared a similar definition: “In its simplest form, the head of enterprise design is responsible for creating consistent, predictable and efficient experiences for our internal workforce that hopefully feel unique and remarkable."
He was brought on in that role, he said, to accelerate the company’s journey of digital revolution. To do that, he had to understand where the company stood in terms of both internal progress toward that effort and benchmarking across competitors.
“The majority of our output involves the presentation of data, insights and analytics in one form or another to a diverse cross-section of our employee base. Finding ways for our teams to maximize their use of these data and action against them easily and confidently continues to be a critical part of our success.”
Pamela Heiligenthal, director of eXperience design at Amtrak, added that the head of enterprise design role can be interpreted differently depending on business and organizational goals.
“I’ve worked at companies where design roles manage the branding and creative vision for the organization, which works well for consumer-facing experiences,” she said. “On the flip side, with design that supports enterprise needs and/or is employee focused, the narrative shifts, focusing more on guidelines, practices and tools.”
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What Skills Does a Head of Enterprise Design Need?
Whatever your interpretation of the head of enterprise design role, there are several key skills this person needs to succeed, said Heiligenthal, including:
- Storytelling
- Creativity
- Empathy
- Strategic thinking
- Mentoring
- Collaboration
- Adaptability
- Financial accountability
- Communication
According to LinkedIn data, some of the most common skills for enterprise design and experience design roles include user experience (UX), user experience design (UED) and user interface design.
Adding to this already long list are some of the fastest-growing skills, including:
- Design systems
- Learning
- UX Research
- Mockups
Key Responsibilities and Components
Heads of enterprise design have a mixed bag of responsibilities. They set research and design visions and expectations across the enterprise, as well as manage relationships, handle visuals and design elements, establish guidelines and patterns, and forecast budgets while scaling teams.
Lindsay broke the role’s responsibilities down into five key components:
1. Experience
Heads of enterprise design define the vision for how they want their digital experiences to function and feel, and “evangelize” that vision across every facet of the organization as much as possible.
Then, they watch how teams respond and use that information to refine. “From there, we start to see that vision becoming something of a collective rallying cry for where we want to be as a digitally enabled workforce not just tomorrow but, more importantly, 18, 24, 36 months down the line and further,” he said.
2. Design Strategy and Innovation
The digital landscape is in constant flux, and according to Lindsay, sticking with the status quo is irresponsible. “We have to be constantly pushing the boundaries of what our users expect, and finding new ways to accelerate their capabilities on the day to day.”
The enterprise design team (and the design strategy and user research function within that team) build out a robust, conversational and seamless interplay between users and data when and where they need it, he added — something achieved through artificial intelligence (AI), cross-device digital touchpoints and configurable preference management.
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3. Data Storytelling and Experiences
One area enterprise design is building into is creating data stories and experiences, backed by a team of data visualization designers.
“The team has a deep, deep understanding of who users are, what they’re responsible for delivering for the business, and how to deliver data and insights which will allow them to 10X their performance,” Lindsay explained.
A single data point can provide value, but understanding all data correlations and dependencies behind one metric at any point in time creates a clear advantage.
4. End-to-End Systems Thinking
Another component of enterprise design is delivering exception experiences through understanding the entire enterprise ecosystem.
“One of the recent functions that we’re building out within the enterprise design team here at Kraft Heinz is the role of the Service Designer. This group is responsible for bringing clarity to all of the inter-related systems, software, services, frameworks and applications, and mapping those back to people, processes and workflows, both digital and analogue,” said Lindsay.
5. Design Thinking
Unpacking complex business problems with different design thinking processes and methodologies allows enterprise design teams to create more informed, human-centered solutions.
Kraft Heinz, Lindsay said, has leaned into agile ways of work in the past three-and-a-half years with the end goal of delivering speed and agility to teams. “All functions within the enterprise design team bring different flavors of design thinking to any given conversation resulting in increased NPS scores, elevated adoption rates and targeted impact delivery.”
Ultimately, Heiligenthal said, there is no typical day-to-day when it comes to the head of enterprise design role.
“One day you’re managing relationships and presenting outcomes to executives. The next day, you’re prioritizing work and identifying hiring and budgeting needs. The next day, you’re measuring results and adjusting strategy, or offering team guidance and mentorship, leading by example. The next day you’re jumping on a whiteboard to conceptualize an idea,” she said.
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Where Does Enterprise Design Fit Into the Structure of the Organization?
Where the head of the enterprise design sits in the organizational hierarchy depends on various factors, Heiligenthal said. Company size and maturity play a role, but typically, she said, it starts in marketing and lands within product, digital and technology groups.
“Organizations can be matrixed or hierarchically structured, and success depends on visibility within the organization. The further the design organization is buried, the harder it is to receive buy-in and get work done,” she explained.
A struggle that many enterprises come up against, she said, is how and where the design organization sits. “Is it centralized, decentralized or embedded within products?”
Each setup has its own benefits and drawbacks, but what’s worked for her is a centralized partnership; one with a distinct, centralized design team that shares a sense of purpose with various product and business teams. “It’s a hub-and-spoke model that centralizes design teams (the hub) and gives us freedom to execute across the organization (the spokes) based on north-star alignment across the business.”
At Kraft Heinz, Lindsay said the enterprise design team is part of the STAR organization, which stands for:
- Strategy
- Transformation
- Agile
- (Digital) Revolution
Their primary responsibility, he said, is to make sure the company is uniquely positioned to be a leader in their field — food and beverage at the intersection of technology.
What’s the Career Path to the Head of Enterprise Design?
Successful design leaders tend to have diverse backgrounds of managerial and operational skills as well as design experience, said Heiligenthal.
“The role requires managing people, relationships and processes as much as it is having a creative mindset, so rounding out your experience will give you an edge at exceeding in the role.”
She started out in the hospitality industry before becoming a pilot and moving into technology and design. “And I’ve hired people with vastly different backgrounds, including industrial designers, interior architects and anthropologists that have been successful in design leadership roles.”
Lindsay said his opportunities throughout the years centered around building out teams across various departments — creative technology, digital production, creative operations, user experience, front-end engineering and more. “The focus has always been centered on how to deliver the maximum quantifiable impact for the business through human-centered innovation.”
For those interested in moving their careers toward this role, his advice is to understand the drivers propelling the company you work for from all possible angles.
“From there,” he continued, “work to understand all aspects and factors of the industry that you’re working in and then begin to obsess over the groups that you’re responsible for delivering solutions to. Get really good at finding the connective thread across those three considerations and then learn how to tell a compelling story to bring others along on the journey of transformation.”
