Financial Times

Being people manager and technical lead for the FT’s Design System team demanded balancing individual contribution, management, and leadership.

It was a journey. When I took on the extra responsibility I started by presenting a new vision for the team at Engine Room, our internal conference. It was an optimistic view that highlighted challenges.

During my time we more than doubled our engineering capacity, infinitely increased our dedicated designers (starting from 0), and became a fully fledged multidisciplinary team. There was still a way to go, but I’m proud of how far we came together.

As the team grew, I balanced leadership and individual contribution as much as possible, relying on the team and the advice of more senior leaders to find ways to share responsibilities.

Technical: I set out a technical architecture for our design system, focusing on integrated designer and front-end engineering tooling (HTML, CSS, JS, JSX, Storybook, Astro, Figma, Design Tokens, and React integrations). I worked with web standards to develop accessible web components. I relied on CI for test automation and release, and I was comfortable manually testing with common assistive technologies. I also set technical direction for the team’s supporting back-end services to reduce costs, complexity, and manage security risks (Fastly, AWS, Heroku, Node.js, Postgres, Splunk).

Leadership: I managed 5 engineers, and coached and mentored 2 others from elsewhere in the business. My goal was identify growth opportunities that align with team members’ personal goals and skills to lay the ground work for me progressing to my own next opportunity.

Communication: I spoke internally, delivered workshops, hosted events, wrote blog posts, authored and presented proposals, conducted interviews, and ran surveys in an attempt to bring others with me towards a collaborative goal. Sometimes the aim was to complete a mandatory technical migration, other times it was to support strategic business change.

Delivery: I collaborated with stakeholders to define the teams' long term roadmap, breaking down cross-team technical tasks to make informed choices, and contributed to the running of day-to-day processes to ensure the team were working well and had everything they need.