How design success becomes leadership failure
Designers are not prepared to become leaders. Not in their training, not in their work, not in their conversations and interactions. And that’s a really big problem.
It’s also sad because designers should make exceptional leaders. We understand users deeply, are naturally empathetic, think systematically, and are skilled at solving complex problems creatively. But we’re not properly prepared to take on executive roles–and so we fail. Worse, our struggles at this next level unfairly discredit design as a discipline.
The hidden rules of executive leadership
Executive leadership–from director up through VP and C-suite–requires a fundamentally different set of skills than the ones designers spent literally decades perfecting throughout their career. The attention to (design) detail, craft mastery, and a hyper focus on every user need is what made us successful individual contributors. These all become secondary concerns at the leadership level.
Here’s what nobody tells you: when you reach senior leadership you’re playing an entirely different game with different rules. None of this is explained. A Senior Director of Design has roughly the same scope and responsibility as a Senior Director of Product: you’re leading an organization and tasked with delivering defined business results. The “design” in your title becomes less important than the “director” in your title.
Because no one explains this transition, we know no better and continue doing what got us here: perfecting designs, diving into pixels, coaching designers on craft. We keep playing the game the way we understood it while our effectiveness as leaders diminishes.
3 critical gaps design leaders face
1. We speak design while our peers speak business.
Executives focus on revenue impacts, market opportunities, conversion metrics, and acquisition costs. Design leaders couch their words in user experience and design aesthetics. This language gap makes us ineffective and marginalizes design’s strategic value.
When presenting to the C-suite, talking about “delightful” user experience carries less weight than demonstrating how design improvements drive measurable business outcomes. We need to translate our design expertise into business impact.
2. We focus inward instead of outward, building alliances.
We are most comfortable ensconced within our design orgs, focusing on team dynamics and designer development. Meanwhile we fail to build the cross-functional relationships that executive leadership demands.
Leaders need to develop connections and navigate the inherent political aspects of corporate organizations. This isn’t about office politics; it’s about building support for the projects and initiatives that will be most impactful. Without these alliances, design work won’t get prioritized or moved forward, regardless of its value.
3. We do work others can do, avoiding work only we can do.
Design leaders often preoccupy themselves with the details of design–the execution, the craft, the ideation. We require designs to be reviewed by us, approved by us. But senior designers and design managers can handle this responsibility. A well organized design team (which as the design leader we should have set up) can ensure good design execution and elevate all designers.
What senior designers and managers can’t do is walk into the CPO’s office to advocate for a new product strategy. They can’t work with executive leadership to secure new hiring or funding. They can’t represent design at the highest levels of strategic decision-making.
It’s about accountability
The hard truth about leadership roles is that once you’re there, no one tells you how to spend your time. No one is going to tell you what to focus on. You’ll have priorities but it’s up to you to figure out how to deliver on them. This freedom becomes a trap when we default to familiar activities.
A director can spend an entire week perfecting a particular design with their team, and no one will tell them to do something different. Meanwhile the strategic priorities they’re accountable for haven’t progressed in a meaningful way. The work feels productive because it’s work we know how to do well, but it’s often not the work that needs to be done.
Preparing for leadership success
Design leaders need to understand how their roles fundamentally change at the executive level. It requires new ways of working and new skills to be successful. This means:
Learning to communicate design value in business terms.
Building relationships across the organization.
Focusing on strategic impact rather than tactical execution.
Understanding that your success is measured by business outcomes alone.
The sooner we recognize this transition and prepare for it, the sooner we’ll be ready for executive leadership. And the sooner we can make the greater impact our organizations need–and design is poised to offer.
