Crowning More than One Queen

Managing a design organization—whether it’s a team, an agency, or a department - is an endless chess game. Let’s be honest, that’s also part of the fun.

As a manager, the board is laid out in front of you, and your designers are the pieces; each one has their own unique and distinct abilities, but all serve the same goal. The better you "play" by leveraging the best qualities of each designer to make the smartest moves, the more effective, efficient, and impactful your design organization will be.

Let’s extend the analogy: On a chessboard, there are several pieces that specialize in a particular action. Each one only knows how to do one thing, but does it perfectly. The bishop moves diagonally, the rook moves vertically and horizontally, and the knight moves in a highly specific L-shape.

Each side also has two generalist pieces: the king and the queen. The king is a limited generalist - it can do almost everything, but only in a small way. The queen, on the other hand, is a powerful generalist. She can do nearly everything without limitations.

Now, back to the heart of our discussion.If you, as a manager, had to choose which pieces to place on your board, and your options were either a board full of knights, bishops, or rooks, or a board full of queens, the choice would be simple: a board full of queens. The queen is a strong generalist. She can do almost everything and the highest level. Why limit yourself to horizontal and vertical movement or diagonal movement alone?

But there’s a catch: the queen can’t move like a knight!

On a board full of queens, you’ll never be able to reach, in a single move, the unique positions that only a knight can reach. The knight’s specialty is exceptional, therefore a necessity.

With a team composed of strong generalist designers, you’ll have an excellent team that offers you, as a manager or design ops leader, nearly infinite possibilities. But it will always be nearly. You’d be missing that edge: the designer with specialized skills who can challenge the rest of the team, demonstrate that there are still new skills to acquire and new areas to grow in.

Before I conclude, it’s important to clarify that I’m looking at this from a macro-level, almost instrumental perspective. Of course, there’s no such thing as a perfect generalist, just as there are very few truly specialized designers who can only do one thing. Naturally, every design organization has its own needs, and the quality of a team is not dictated solely by the distribution of skills.

There’s no doubt that today’s industry values good generalist designers far