How can I get my Head of Product Design to actually do their job effectively?
I have been working at my current gig for 2 years now; for the most part, it's been good. Myself and another product designer started at the same time. About a year in, the C-suite gave the other designer the Head of Product Design title. At first, I was excited to be able to work with someone they saw as leadership material, as for the first time in my career it would give me a very clear and direct line to mentorship.
Almost all of my career has been myself handling most of the UX and design tasks within an organisation. That being said, I have over 10 years’ experience across government and private (both B2B and B2C) sectors, and I am good at what I do, but very much enjoy being close to the work.
I don't know much about their career other than they were within a more corporate environment at a much larger company and pivoted into UX via a bootcamp during the pandemic.
I have sat back for the past year and listened, watched, and experienced how they've been operating. What I've been through has been incredibly frustrating, and I'm just about at the end of my rope. They seem incredibly out of their depth from both a UX and managerial perspective, and my attempts at helping them in either capacity do not seem to be working. I feel compressed into being a commandeering asshole just trying to get them to do their job.
They are consistently eating up my time by scheduling recurring meetings or ad hoc meetings in my calendar. At no stage (and I've checked) have these had an agenda, notes of preparation, or noted outcomes. They are almost always end of day and occur frequently on Fridays. I have addressed this with them; they need to be more mindful of inviting someone to a 1-hour meeting with no context titled "Buttons". I noted that at their level this should be SOP, and if they did this to a junior designer or a coworker with anxiety, it'd likely negatively impact them + anyone senior will get fed up with it.
As for the content of the meetings, it'll be questions like, "Where have you used this type of button across your platform surface?"—something that, if asked beforehand (while time-consuming), I could definitely provide.
They seem to like using meetings as a way to block out time and voice questions they can easily find the answers to themselves or talk through problems. This is fine, as rubber-ducking is a valid problem-solving tool, but the meetings are never prefaced with this, and I am never told ahead of time what they might need from me, so 20 minutes of the hour is eaten up by me darting around files. I've established a boundary with them that I will no longer accept agendaless meetings, but they keep sending them anyway.
Off the back of this—and this is going to sound harsh—but they seem incapable of internally synthesising solutions to problems. They frequently parrot phrases or ideas from leadership and direct me to complete work based on these ideas without knowing why or how to achieve it. It will be extremely vague, like "improve colour on this page". I often have to ask them repeated follow-up questions like what's prompted this, why they believe it's an issue, etc. They never have a resolute answer and don't even bother to look at the analytics to see if the page is performing well or not. I've tried communicating that they need to provide clear context and outcomes, as it's incredibly important when assigning tasks to team members so they can complete the work without constant oversight.
Additionally, they like to absorb my work. To be honest, ordinarily I am okay with this; it's part of being a team player and the norm if you're an IC who likes to keep their head down. The issue is that the team simply isn't big enough to have this happening, as it's just me under them.
They will mention my work as part of their outcomes or reporting for the week. They will go into my files looking for conceptual artefacts to present or use. They will assign me tickets, and after I ask all the team questions to determine what actually needs to be done, once they realise the task isn't as hard as they thought, they reassign it to themselves.
Again, normally I would chalk this up to manager things, but they often turn off meeting transcripts, wait until others leave the room to ask me architectural questions about the project, or refuse to actually assign me a task in the project management software so there's clear ownership. They seem to prefer non-tracked, agendaless meetings for this very reason.
I've stopped playing ball with a lot of the above for my own sanity, but as a result, they will go to the devs asking completely design-related questions to try to get the answers to problems they should be able to figure out. The devs will actually push back and say that this is a question design needs to answer (props to them), but it's not really helping the erosion in design authority or culture.
I think they know they're struggling and the areas they're falling short, but they're doubling down on masking it all via these secretive tactics, which is beginning to cause me grief because the execs are starting to ask me about timelines for projects they are in charge of (because they know the work is large enough to be divvied up, and by that measure I should have some idea). The reality is I don’t know, because they don’t communicate or break work down unless I do it myself. Some tasks have dragged on for 6 months that should take less than a week. They also seem resistant to my advice and I think it's partially due to them being much older than me and holding the title.
Is there a way I can help them without taking on all their responsibilities? I feel exhausted trying to mentor someone who was supposed to mentor me.
I wish I could say I was being selfless here but them constantly putting me on the spot in meetings when they can't explain the basic UX thinking behind my work they've pilfered without me knowing until it appears in a slide or leadership probing for their project status through me is stressing me out. I just want the heat off me so I can focus on the work.