Hey —

Don’t worry too much about the business and management side of things. What you’re going to struggle with is losing the hands-on design time. You’re going to have to learn to do less of the work yourself, be okay with that, and teach others on the team to do what you do.

Sometimes you’ll think your team understand your approach and will be able to replicate it, and you won’t realize what a huge body of methods and assumptions you bring to your own design practice. And you’re going to feel like it’s hubristic and self-centered to try to teach those things instead of letting people bring their own strategies. Allowing team autonomy and honoring different voices is important, but your personal skill set is key to the project you’re leading. You need to value it and share it, because you will not be able to scale yourself up enough to do everything the project needs.

I know, it’s rough. I still haven’t completely solved it out.