How do I become a design leader?

This is a question I hear a lot from IC designers who are curious about moving into leadership roles. Here’s what I’ve been sharing with my teams.

If you’re eager to move into leadership or find yourself yearning for more ownership, the first thing is to start leading from where you are now. You can manage from any location in an organization —and that’s ultimately how you’ll increase your influence. Leadership isn’t anointed, it’s recognized.

Particularly for design, it’s important to recognize that being excellent at your craft is just one small part of what leadership entails. This is because leaders don’t merely “do” things. Rather, they inspire and move their team, and the team does the doing.

So, what gets recognized as leadership?

This is a short list of qualities I’ve observed in folks who rise—not just in standard role definitions or within organizations, but to the very top of their field. These are the kind of traits that make someone the first pick when people are starting a new business venture, looking for advice, or building an important new feature.

1. Integrity

If you have integrity, you’ve earned the trust of the team. You’re thorough, you’re a team player, and you listen. When push comes to shove, you don’t hide in a corner. You show up in a way that others can’t, don’t, or won’t. You offer clarity, not excuses. You’re unstoppable around your commitments. You set expectations and deliver.

You’re honest. You give people credit for their contributions. You take responsibility for articulating expectations. When you fail, you don’t deflect it onto others. You own up to it and course correct. You own outcomes, whether they met expectations or not, whether those expectations were said or unsaid.

2. Vision

Visionaries are both great listeners and great storytellers. They can talk to anyone and pull value out of them. They know how to leverage the ideas from their team and assemble a holistic vision through that conversation. Most importantly, their vision for the future includes clear stepping stones for how to get there.

What that looks like: you’ve got a running hypothesis (or a few) and you’re communicating about them with your team and enrolling them in your ideas. You have skin in the game. You can share your thoughts in a strongly stated, loosely held way that invites discussion and debate from the folks around you.

• You inspire people
• You create safety for others to take risks and think boldly
• You always present with a point of view
• You don’t design by the tool, you make the tool
• You don’t solve problems, you dissolve them

3. Focus

Highly effective people demonstrate focus and strategic thinking by paying attention to problems that are high-impact and reflect company values.

With focus, you set (and honor) boundaries with your team on how much exploration to do. You know how to break a giant problem into testable iterations. Once the time period of idea generation has passed, your crosshairs are on the challenge/phase at hand. You’ll explore the occasional wild card idea after finishing strong on what you’ve agreed to deliver.

You’re also making sure your time is high quality. You decline (or have your manager triage) requests that eat at your time. Similarly, you avoid designs that don’t immediately impact the project or that complicate experiments.

When you’re managing yourself effectively, managers don’t have to actively manage you. This leads naturally to more independence. Engineers feel confident about when they can start work. Your projects stay on projected deadlines. When your projects run smoothly, people are only too eager to let you make more projects run smoothly.

4. Craft

Solid craft enables you to connect your visionary thinking with the architecture needed to get there. Design solutions that enable the team to be flexible about exploring future ideas. At the same time, construct each iteration with clear directionality so you’re starting to train both the team and your users toward the idea of where you’d like to go.

Impeccable craft leaves no loose ends

• Remove harmful ambiguity and usability holes that impact user comprehension and focus
• Develop solutions in concert with engineering needs — as simple as possible while still enabling the team to learn
• Design process is informed by existing user behavior patterns and where those behaviors are trending

Craft is also communication. When you hand over your designs to engineers, they’re not guessing about edge cases or interactions. They feel secure that you have fully thought through everything, even more than what they’ve thought about. A thorough designer would never, for example, hand someone a single screen as an example of a multi-step flow, and expect the engineer to “make that”.

How this impacts your role

• Managers trust you to know the problem
• Cross-functional team respects and trusts design
• Fewer revisions needed after reviews
• Experiments built on your solutions move faster

5. Managing the team

Great team management creates order through powerful communication and teamwork. Give other people responsibility and hold them accountable: get a commitment affixed to a date. Then, check in on that date.

On the more personal level, you’re creating a culture of excellence through safety. You draw out the “quiet” ones. You constructively leverage the passion of the “difficult” ones. You create space for other people to participate in the creative process. You help people work better together.

This might be the great secret about leadership and ownership: much of it is determined by what you enable other people to do and be. It’s not actually about you.

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6. Managing the project

Regardless of your title, you own your project when you are 100% clear on what the problem is and the factors that go into that problem. If you can quickly paint a picture for stakeholders in 1–2 sentences, and the stakeholders are bought into the idea, that’s a good sign.

Always be clear on what you’re doing and why

• Figure out which things are open questions or negotiable via data or research
• Determine what factors are non-negotiable via data or research
• Document thinking and decisions to prevent the same conversations from cropping up again

Use your cross-functional partners and managers

Sometimes, people avoid asking for help because they think it will undermine their image as a leader. “If I ask for help, people will assume I don’t know what I’m doing.” Wrong! Great leaders unlock the best solution through leveraging the collective brainpower around them.

If you reach a stalemate or if new questions arise, resist any temptation to make uninformed promises. Bring the issue to your cross-functional team. If need be, don’t hesitate to reach out to higher levels of management. Leverage the support you have in your organization to drive better outcomes.

This is particularly important because the implications of what you’re building can inadvertently dictate the future development potential of the product. It can be catastrophically expensive longterm to commit to architecting a feature in a way that ultimately hinders what the team can easily explore in the future.

Drive alignment

If you want design to be an equal partner, that starts with making everyone else an equal partner.

• Work with the cross-functional team to frame experiments
• Get involved with what metrics are best indicators of project success
• Alongside product and engineering, take responsibility for open product questions and actively unblock the team
• Be connected to ship dates and schedule design reviews with the engineers so the team ships true to vision
• Design is a black box to non-designers, so make time to communicate about design organization processes to the cross-functional team, including design-driven reviews and feedback
• Own and manage any production work being done for you and liaise between production and engineering as needed

How this impacts your role

• The cross-functional team trusts you to represent projects on your own and hold true to the project vision
• Changes become a conversation, not something only designers own (way better for us since we’re all better informed about our particular product areas)
• People on other teams don’t ask the same question to different team members and get different answers — we’re in agreement because we’ve talked it through.
• Engineers, production, etc. feel totally supported by you
• Shipping quality goes up

When you can drive projects forward, you become a design powerhouse, an authority who truly owns the user experience. You are a reliable team member that creates stability and organization around you. You tackle challenges like a sniper. People will notice when you’re regularly shipping quality product that helps the team learn quickly.

7. Managing yourself

Be real, be patient, and be kind about what you expect from yourself and others.

Use your team to help prioritize what you work on

• What will have the most impact on the team, the org, and the company? What deliverables are most urgent and depend on your contribution?
• If you ever sense yourself slowing down, feeling confused, or losing interest — reach out to your manager and teammates. It’s the perfect time to get another perspective (and perhaps some inspiration) on the problem. It may also point to a latent issue with the problem itself.

Pick your battles

If everything is an emergency, then nothing is an emergency. While you may feel passionately about any number of things, hearing about constant upset causes a lot of thrash for the team. So if there are causes that you feel strongly about, pick 2–3 and focus the energy and attention span of the team on those few critical areas. This will also help prevent you from burning out.

Be professional

These last points may sound like nitpicking, but details like these demonstrate respect for your teammates, your manager, and the company in a way that no words can.

• Attend the meetings you accept and show up on time
• Don’t accept meetings you don’t plan on attending
• If you’re planning on working form home, notify folks via email before end of the previous workday, so your manager knows exactly where you are and the team can shift any planned meetings around your situation.
• For paid time off, ask for manager approval via email a minimum 4 weeks lead time for taking 1+ weeks off, so the team can plan around you without losing velocity.
• Ask your manager for approval before expensing anything. This will save you and your manager from the awkward scenario of rejected expenses falling back on your own dime.
• Ask your manager when you want to start an unplanned project or participate in a project with another team, so management can assess priorities and team impact. This helps find a balance between passion projects and meaningfully important projects.

Why do these things matter?

Leadership draws upon mutual respect. It is not a magical power bestowed upon a special person. Acknowledgement bubbles up naturally through demonstrating trustworthiness and competence.

As you begin to lead from where you are now, powerful inter-communication will be your tool for developing, testing, and advocating for ideas. Should you want to enroll your team in building a bridge, you’ll get more traction when you can show 1) how it can be done and 2) how it will lead to something meaningful. It’s pretty hard to execute solo on a strategy, so you’ll need to build it with people and inspire them to work on it. Think of yourself as tending the conversation, even if the idea you end up advocating isn’t your own.

Poor leaders evade accountability and avoid choosing, and this is fatal to teams and companies. Making strategic decisions requires taking a position and prioritizing which positions merit attention first. It’s not necessarily easy, and it’s certainly not for everyone.

The emphasis on integrity, vision, focus, and so on is not accidental. When you lead a team, any personal disfunction you have gets amplified to the rest of the team. On the plus side, any personal effectiveness is also amplified. So start by working on your personal effectiveness. As you extend it to how you interact with the team and your projects, the folks around you will naturally begin to observe how you’re leading.

Coming soon: How to help people observe how you’re leading. Follow me to get updated when it drops. Thx!

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