Design leadership knows business and pushes craft

Excerpts from my feature in Jaleh Afshar’s “Chief Design Officers at Work”

Influencing teams through craft

When millions to billions of people use your product, they deserve the best. As a design leader, having a deep focus on craft is one way to signal to your teams that excellence and quality matters, down to the smallest of details. We are lucky and privileged to have the jobs we do as designers. We should sweat the little things.

Beyond steering quality, focusing on craft earns influence with one of your most important constituents as a design leader: the designers themselves. Gaining the respect of a design team means them trusting your sense of taste, wanting your feedback, and leaning on you to call out when work isn’t good enough yet. Leaders with a high bar for quality inspire and attract some of the best talent, so I strive to be a leader who can articulate excellence at every level, from people to pixels.

Caring about craft is about mutual trust, respect, and empathy having been through real challenges as a designer myself.

Becoming an executive design leader

A great design leader understands the business first, with a reputation built on their high quality bar for people and product. Before I represent Design, I first try to meet every other leader where they are. I aim for fluency in the company’s operating principles, key business metrics, and overall strategic direction. Only then can I do my part to represent Design to other leaders.

Design makes hard things feel simple. Representing Design at the company-level means being the voice of the user in meeting rooms while having one of the most critical eyes for design work happening across the company. It also means helping the company reduce complexity not just in the work itself, but suggesting ways to simplify processes of how we arrive at good work in the first place.