Lead the betting, under the gun

My first design job was an internship at Fossil, where I started as an intern. The role handed me the most non-glamourous task that never stood a chance to get in my portfolio: line sheets. Every quarter, wholesalers received a catalog of hundreds of products across every brand Fossil made licensed product for, each with a photo, a name, a SKU, a price, and a pile of other metadata. Two of us spent two weeks pasting every field into InDesign and rescaling every photo by eye, because no two shots came out of post-production at the same size or ratio.

I learned data merge to pull the metadata straight from a spreadsheet, which fixed the input. The photos needed a fix at the source. I asked the photography team how they would shoot products if there was a need to standardize. I asked post production if the choice were theirs, how would they could ensure they could save the production ready files the same way every time. Together we built jigs for the studio and Photoshop actions that ran after retouching, before anything landed in the DAM. Line sheets went from two people and two weeks to one person and about thirty minutes a quarter.

The standards reached well past the line sheets. Michele, one of the brands, already had a web-based configurator that let customers pair one watch face with any band they wanted, and it was a nightmare to maintain. Standardized photography made it simple to keep running, and the process survived the move from Flash to HTML. The ask was to produce the linesheets - no one asked the intern to fix the entire photography pipeline.

Leadership shows up in how you answer a straightforward ask. I could have filled the boxes faster, but I asked why the boxes were so hard to fill.

Lead from where you sit

I've advocated for leading from where you sit for my whole career. Every straightforward ask sits on top of a system. Often within these systems, someone makes a decision, walks it over to design, and says "this is what I need designed." Design can execute the request as written, or design can trace it back to whatever made it necessary and fix that, so the fix reaches everyone downstream.

When a solution lands on a designer's desk, the job is to poke holes in it right away. Pushback can seem like obstruction to whoever already made the decision, but there are methods to be a partner rather than the "Dept. of NO".

I picture a boat that's already floating. It isn't sinking yet, but design can spot the holes and patch them while the fix is still cheap. Design also notices the boat only has one oar, and suggests a second one, or maybe a small motor. Some pushback protects the business from risk, and some pushes it toward an opportunity nobody scoped. Both count as leadership, and neither require a title, just a bit of intention.

Design owns the intentionality

Where does design's authority actually live? The business can decide what a product offers. Design should own the intentionality behind how people experience it.

Most products ship the straightforward offering and never encode how anyone should move through it. Design does that layer of intentionality very well, and frequently the business steamrolls it, overrules it, or finds it unclaimed because design never picked up the reins.

At RealPage, the business wanted a way for residents to e-sign a lease renewal. Reasonable ask, clear scope. When design dug in, we saw that renewal overlapped heavily with the original leasing experience, and the system already held most of what residents had entered the first time. Bolting a signature onto a renewal form would have asked people to hand over information we already had. We built renewal on top of the data residents had already given us, and the time from notice to renewal shrunk while the renewal rate climbed.

The business asked for a signature experience. Design saw the system underneath it and changed what the business decided to build.

Why designers get cast as decorators

Executives hear "designer" and think "decorator." The blame doesn't split cleanly, but I see the pattern more often than not, and it costs more than most leaders realize.

My own cautionary tale comes from a few past experiences where I joined a team, I was still learning the business, and I had no clout to spend. The conversation about the marketing experience often centered simply on how it looked, while the bigger opportunity sat in the business logic and the packaging of the actual product offering. Design needed a seat at that table, and I didn't have one yet. So I did what I could from where I sat: moved components around the page, with a collaborative experimentation mindset. Nobody there set out to sideline design. Good teams land in this spot all the time.

The decorator label sticks because of a language gap that runs both ways. Designers rarely learn to speak executive, and executives rarely learn to speak design. The design leader ends up as the only interpreter in the building, and that interpreter becomes the bottleneck: analyst, translator, and the person dictating every synthesis down to the team. A relay station rarely gets mistaken for a decision-maker.

Team size changes where the dysfunction hides

Leaders tend to assume a solo designer and a forty-person design org need different things from the business. They need help with the same decisions. Team size only changes where the failure hides.

A team of one does everything. That designer usually excels at execution and struggles with negotiation and business communication, or excels at the business conversation while the design comes out lackluster. Either way, the gap shows fast, because it has nowhere to hide.

Big teams build a pecking order and assume specialization: these people negotiate, those people execute. Sometimes that holds. Sometimes tenure propped people into roles their skills don't support. The larger the team, the more dysfunction it can absorb, and the longer that dysfunction hides inside the design function.

Neither size closes the language gap on its own. A team of one needs a designer who can make the business case. A team of forty needs a leader who can make it without becoming the only person allowed to.

AI widens the lens

For a stretch of the late 2010s and early 2020s, a lot of UX teams operated as production houses. "We need this screen to reflect this flow." That was always my least favorite part of the work, because it shrank the problem to whatever fit on the artboard, and every narrow request narrowed the team's understanding of the problem space a little more.

Fossil showed me the fix long before AI existed. When production behaves like a function, automate it and spend the human eye on judgment. Data merge gave two people back two weeks every quarter. AI hands hours back the same way, across far more of the work.

Business leaders tend to hear "creativity" and "experimentation" as cost centers. I mean controlled experiments that put real changes in front of real users, show what works in production faster, and drive actual product change and adoption. A team stuck in production mode can only move pixels around a screen, the way my team once did. A team with its hours back can test the plan packaging or the renewal logic and find out what really moves the business.

The more design can get a wider-angle lens on the actual picture the more it benefits business, conversely a business that uses design (OR AI for that matter) only to become a feature factory will suffer from the same production-centric narrow view.

Operating differently

Both sides can close the language gap, and both benefit when they do.

Business leaders: lean out of subjectivity. "I like the blue one" tells design nothing about impact. Make design explain why a decision will matter to the business, and make that explanation a standing requirement in every review. Additionally, it isn't WHAT you say, or HOW you say it, it's WHEN you allow design to be heard. Bring design in before the decision gets made, while design can still change what you build.

Design leaders: hold yourselves to the same standard, and change how you tell the story. Executives don't need the reasoning behind a color or a proof that one interaction beats another for accessibility. Step all the way back to the workflow and the user enablement that those joint decisions add up to. Then tell it the way you'd explain it to a friend who knows nothing about design or the workflow: what can people do now that they couldn't do before your work?

That story paints the picture for an exec. It also gives your team a model for talking about their own work, so you stop serving as the only interpreter in the building.

Give design the seat on purpose

Design sits where the business offering, the customer's need, and the day-to-day operation collide. Spend that view on decoration, and the business gives up the one seat that sees all three at once. Design shouldn't need luck or stubbornness to use it.

If you're working out where design sits in your org, from either chair, I'd like to hear how it's going. Connect with me on LinkedIn.