DESIGN LEADERSHIP

Hey, senior designer, don’t fade into a “strategic nobody”!

When you’re aiming beyond the senior level, but get stuck with leftover “strategic” tasks, leading nowhere

I know that euphoria when, after a plateau in design work at a big company, you suddenly catch a wave and find yourself with ✨a seat at the table✨

Not the biggest table yet, but a bunch of smaller seats at smaller — yet still important — tables.

After years of solid hands-on work and bingeing on lectures, articles, and podcasts about leadership and impact, you finally click with a company that trusts you with strategic tasks, going beyond classic senior designer responsibilities. It feels like a step up, maybe even a breakthrough.

Wow! Thrilling!

Better yet, you’re asked to do the things others can’t deliver. There might be an official Head of UX, but it’s you whom the CEO calls on to drive change management and raise design implementation quality. There might be a Group Product Manager, but it’s you who leads customer journey mapping while that manager stays buried in backlog micromanagement and staffing engineers.

It feels great — fulfilling, even fairly compensated. “Hell yeah, who’s design-driven now, huh?” you might think. But if you stay in that mode for too long, you risk turning into a company-specific gap-filler, with value that’s hard to translate beyond the walls of your current employer.

That’s what I call becoming a “strategic nobody.”

Who is a “strategic nobody”?

Business is utterly pragmatic. Companies don’t really care about justice or how your CV looks in the long run. What they do care about is getting the job done, including plugging gaps with whoever is most capable in the moment. And when you’re a senior designer with broad skills and a reputation for reliability, that “whoever” is often you.

A “strategic nobody” is a senior specialist who fills gaps with high-impact work but lacks clear ownership, leaving their value unclear.

The problem is that sporadic strategic assignments rarely come with clear ownership. They’re urgent, improvised, and often framed as “special projects.” And while inside the company, you might look like a hero, outside it, those projects are hard to explain — they don’t always translate into recognizable skills on the job market.

But let’s forget about the job market for a while. Even inside your company, you might still look immature compared to “real leaders” with clear roles and KPIs. Instead of being seen as a leader, you risk getting a reputation of the person who steps in when no one else wants the responsibility. That reputation can be sticky. Once colleagues start associating you with “special projects,” it becomes harder to move into roles with defined scope and measurable impact.

And here’s the irony: while you’re proud of tackling complex, cross-functional challenges and being a “glue” between teams and projects, others may see your work as scattered, reactive, or even secondary. You might be delivering value, but not in a way that clearly positions you for the next step in your career.

Why is doing unstructured strategic work a trap?

First of all, it’s not all bad.

Half a year of ad hoc strategic tasks can be a valuable leadership bootcamp — an empowering experience that lets you test your own strength and say, “Yes, I can do this. I’m capable of this kind of work.” It’s a great way to confront impostor syndrome and try on a new role before fully committing to it.

The problem is when it goes far beyond that half-year. When ad hoc strategic work stretches into years, it stops being a learning opportunity and starts becoming a career trap.

You lose depth in your craft — the design skills that made you valuable in the first place. You also become harder to evaluate, since your contributions don’t align with recognized leadership benchmarks. Recruiters and executives alike struggle to place you: are you a leader, a designer, or just the reliable person who fills in the blanks?

In the end, unstructured strategic work can leave you in limbo — not advancing as a craft expert, not solidifying as a leader, and not building a story of impact that travels beyond your current company.

What can be a better approach?

Instead of drifting from one ad hoc task to another, treat your strategic work as a deliberate plan. Once you’ve gotten a taste of what it entails in those initial ad hoc tasks, you’re ready to take the reins and map out what makes sense to do next.

• Analyze the company’s strategy. You should’ve gotten a better sense of it while getting involved in ad hoc strategic initiatives. Use that knowledge to justify how your work contributes to the company’s broader goals.
• Identify projects with measurable impact. Focus on initiatives that clearly showcase your leadership and deliver tangible results.
• Be ambitious. Outline 2–5 major initiatives that can realistically take 6–12 months to complete, creating lasting impact.

Once you have a draft of those initiatives, flesh out the details and get ready to pitch them to top management:

1. Define clear objectives and success metrics. Show exactly what success looks like and how it will be measured.
2. Explain the impact. Tie each initiative to company goals and illustrate the full value chain — from what you plan to do all the way to financial outcomes.
3. Anticipate questions and challenges. Prepare thoughtful answers and alternatives to demonstrate strategic thinking. Treat the first version of your plan as a conversation starter: it ensures you don’t enter the negotiation in a weak position, asking for work, but it can evolve as you align with business stakeholders.
4. Show your roadmap. Outline timelines, dependencies, and key milestones so leaders can see that the plan is realistic and achievable.

Here is an example of how ad hoc strategic work can be scaled into a systemic, high-impact initiative:

🔥 Ad hoc project
You were asked to help improve collaboration between design and engineering in the entire product domain. You organized a full-day program of alignment and strategizing activities for 20 people, including directors and VPs. All people listened to you, followed your recommendations, and didn’t hold back their praise at the end. Great success!

📈 Strategic initiative
Now that you’ve seen firsthand how collaboration issues undermine product quality, hurt customer retention, and cost the company revenue, you can take this effort beyond a one-time workshop and claim official ownership of the topic. You can draft and propose an 8-month company-wide program for improving the UX aspect of product quality:

1. Set the vision: Frame UX quality not just as surface polish but as a driver of retention and revenue protection.

2. Build cross-functional alignment: Bring design, engineering, and product management together around shared quality standards.

3. Operationalize improvements: Introduce practices like cross-team design reviews, paired QA sessions, and usability checkpoints before release.

4. Enable teams: Facilitate the creation of playbooks, training, and tools that make it easier for every squad to deliver high-quality experiences.

5. Track progress: Measure impact through reduced churn, fewer UX-related support tickets, higher feature adoption, and improved customer satisfaction.

This transforms a one-off facilitation into an official program that systematically boosts cross-functional performance — with you as its recognized owner. It can pave the way to a formal leadership role if you are pursuing one: for example, a Design Operations Manager or a Principal Designer.

By planning strategically rather than reacting to whatever comes your way, you turn opportunities into a coherent trajectory: measurable growth, stronger visibility, and a leadership profile that travels with you beyond a single team or company.

Here is another example:

🔥 Ad hoc project
You happened to see the CEO’s investor presentation, pointed out gaps, and were entrusted to help fix it. Instead of just polishing slides, you noticed the narrative was fragmented and key metrics were buried. You restructured the storyline, clarified the logic behind growth numbers, and reframed design’s role in the company’s strategy. The presentation landed well with investors, and leadership appreciated the sharper thinking.

️📉 Why this shouldn’t scale
You might’ve earned some trust points from top management for this, but was it a good involvement? Is there a risk now that they’ll ask you to do “slide magic” every time there is a presentation? While this task went beyond making things pretty, it’s still an isolated executive favor rather than a strategic direction for the company. Yes, it was valuable intellectual work, but it doesn’t drive sustainable business outcomes.

However, you can treat it as a source of insight: did you pick up any confidential context about the company’s financial structure that you can later use to justify design-oriented initiatives? Did you catch a glimpse of what the company really prioritizes right now but doesn’t communicate broadly?

📈 What to do instead
If the investor presentation highlights revenue growth as a top priority, you can turn that insight into a UX-driven strategic initiative. For example, propose a 6-month R&D program focused on rapid experimentation: partner with engineering to design and prototype proofs of concept that test new features, flows, or monetization ideas. This positions you as the owner of a structured, design-led effort that directly impacts revenue — something both investors and top management genuinely care about. The best part? Your work will only be accelerated and won’t be blocked by stakeholders because you’re enabling what truly matters for the company’s survival.

As you can see, it’s vital to look critically at everything that lands on your plate — even if it feels “strategic” or impactful at first glance. If you couldn’t imagine turning it into a case study, even hypothetically, chances are it wasn’t really worth your time. It took me a long while to learn how to choose my battles, and I hope these reflections help you get unstuck and approach your career with more intention.

Recognize yourself in this article? Here’s a final mantra for you:

Stop drifting — start steering. Pick the right projects. Own them end-to-end. Measure impact. Show results.