There is a persistent idea in tech that design leadership is a softer form of leadership. Less political, less exposed, and more vibey. Design organizations are often seen as a place where experienced leaders can focus on craft, culture, and quality, while product and business leaders handle the harder edges of accountability. This framing glosses over the demanding, strategic, and often invisible work required to align creative teams with business goals.
I did not learn how to lead in design school. I learned how to see, how to critique, and how to care deeply about form, clarity, and intention. School taught me taste, process, and confidence in my point of view, but not how decisions actually get made once design leaves the room. That gap widened during a decade in creative agencies, where persuasion and presentation are rewarded, success is measured in approval rather than outcomes, and you can sell ideas without ever owning their consequences. I did not fully understand that gap until I moved into product management, where the shift was uncomfortable in all the right ways. The work stopped being about proposing the best idea and became about choosing which imperfect idea to ship, with real accountability attached. You learn quickly that conviction without prioritization is noise, and that strategy only matters if it survives contact with constraints.
In recent years I’ve landed somewhere in the middle, leading a design and product experience teams. I’m not gonna lie, at times it’s more awkward than I expected! What has surprised me most is not how familiar the work feels, but how much harder it is than the version of design leadership I was implicitly trained to expect.
Influence Is Harder Than Authority
One of the biggest misconceptions about design leadership is that it becomes easier as you move away from delivery and closer to influence. In my experience, influence without authority is much more demanding than authority itself. In product roles, decision rights are usually explicit. When conflict arises, there is a known escalation path. When tradeoffs must be made someone is expected to decide, and teams, especially newly formed ones, often look to product. That clarity does not eliminate tension, but it gives it shape.
Design leadership rarely comes with that kind of clarity. More often, it places leaders in a position where responsibility significantly exceeds formal control:
- You are accountable for experience quality without owning the roadmap, the staffing model, or the delivery cadence.
- You are responsible for coherence across teams, systems, and products that do not report to you.
- You are expected to raise the bar without becoming a bottleneck, and to advocate for users without positioning yourself as anti-business.
None of this is soft work. It is difficult systems work
This is where many design leaders struggle, especially those who have stayed close to craft throughout their careers. They assume that strong ideas, good taste, and well-researched arguments will naturally carry weight. Sometimes they do, but often they do not. Being right is not enough when you do not control the conditions under which decisions are made.
What I learned in product management, and continue to rely on in design leadership, is that prioritization is the real language of leadership. Strategy only matters if it shows up in sequencing, tradeoffs, and resourcing. If you do not understand how those mechanisms work, your influence will always be partial. Your ideas may be admired, but they will not reliably shape outcomes.
Craft Doesn’t Scale. Systems Do.
Design education prepares you to solve problems within a frame, but at the leadership level, design leaders are required to understand how frames get set in the first place. Who defines success? Who absorbs risk? Who pays the cost of delay? These dynamics determine what is possible long before a designer sits down with an overpriced coffee and launches Figma.
Senior design leaders are constantly shaping systems, whether they intend to or not. Team topology, review rituals, decision rights, and escalation paths all influence experience quality far more than individual artifacts. If you do not have a point of view on structure, people, and process, you end up reacting to symptoms instead of addressing causes. You push for better design while the system quietly produces the opposite.
Business acumen ties all of this together. This is not about becoming a finance expert or chasing revenue at the expense of users. It is about understanding what the organization actually optimizes for, how success is measured, and where pressure originates. Without that fluency, design advocacy often lands as resistance rather than contribution. You are speaking a language the business does not fully understand.
Leading Without the Levers
In my current role, leading through influence rather than direct ownership has forced me to become more deliberate. I spend less time arguing for what I believe is right and more time understanding how decisions are actually made. I invest in relationships not as a soft skill, but as infrastructure. I think carefully about when to push, when to wait, and when to escalate, knowing that timing often matters as much as correctness.
This work is not glamorous. Much of it is invisible, and keeping it from staying that way requires constant effort. When it goes well, it often passes without notice. When it goes poorly, design is usually blamed anyway.
That is why the idea of design leadership as a safe haven persists. From the outside, it looks quieter. There is no end-to-end product mandate, no engineering armies to deploy, no obvious decision point where the buck stops. But that quiet is deceptive. It is the quiet of diffuse responsibility, where outcomes depend on alignment rather than authority, and where progress is incremental until it suddenly compounds.
Design leadership without strong product judgment, organizational literacy, and business fluency collapses into focusing on craft and vibes. The work may feel aligned with design identity, but it rarely scales. It depends on heroics rather than structure, persuasion rather than leverage. It can be safer, but then its impact is severely limited.
The hardest part of design leadership is learning how organizations work, how businesses decide, and how to lead effectively without guaranteed authority. I learned this the long way, by crossing boundaries and living with the consequences. I am not sure there was a faster path, but it left me prepared for the work ahead.