Leadership4 min read
When I became Design Lead at UNOWHY in 2020, I had spent six years becoming a designer whose opinion on craft was worth something. I knew how to structure a Figma file. I had strong views on typography. I could look at an interaction pattern and explain precisely why it would fail on mobile. That accumulated judgment felt like the asset I was bringing to the lead role.
It turned out to be the thing I had to let go of most deliberately.
The first thing that changes when you move into a lead role is the calendar. As an individual contributor, the bulk of your time is in tools: design software, prototyping, reviewing your own work. As a lead, the bulk of your time is in other people's work and in the conditions that make that work possible. Meetings, hiring processes, priority discussions, stakeholder conversations. The ratio inverted within the first few months. I went from spending perhaps 70 percent of my time in Figma to spending 70 percent of my time in rooms.
This shift is obvious in retrospect, but it is not well described in most accounts of the designer-to-lead transition. The standard framing is about people management: you go from doing to enabling. That is true but incomplete. The harder adjustment is that your craft judgment, which you spent years building, stops being directly applicable to the daily work. You cannot redesign your team's output. You can only shape the conditions under which it gets made.
What I ended up doing as a lead can be organized into four areas. Hiring: finding and evaluating people whose skills complement the team rather than replicate it. Process design: deciding how the team works, what artifacts it produces, how decisions get made and documented. Priority setting: choosing which problems are worth design investment and which are not, and holding that line under pressure. Stakeholder alignment: making sure that the people outside the design team who affect the design team understand what the team is doing and why.
These four functions share a characteristic: they are all about the quality of the environment, not the quality of the artifact. When they are done well, designers on the team produce better work than they would have produced without the lead function. When they are done poorly, even strong individual designers struggle to produce good output consistently.
The craft equivalent of this is designing for systems rather than screens. A single well-designed screen is a different kind of contribution than a design system that makes every screen in the product more coherent. The lead role is the organizational version of that shift in scale.
The hardest adjustment was accepting that my team would make different design decisions than I would have made, and that this was fine. Not just tolerable, but actually correct.
A designer I hired had a different approach to information density than I did. Where I would have reduced the number of elements on screen, she would keep them and use hierarchy to manage the complexity. Her approach was not wrong, it was different, and it served users with different mental models than the ones I had been optimizing for. When I overrode her decisions based on my own aesthetic preferences, I made the work worse, not better. More importantly, I undermined the ownership she needed to do good work over the long term.
The discipline the lead role requires is the discipline to ask "will this work for users?" rather than "would I have made this choice?" Those are different questions. The first is useful. The second produces a team of designers who are executing someone else's taste rather than developing their own judgment.
The transition is workable when the lead has a clear model of what they are contributing that does not depend on craft output. In my case, that model crystallized around a specific belief: the quality of a design team is mostly determined by the quality of its inputs and decisions, not the talent of its individual members. Inputs include the problems the team works on, the user research it has access to, the time it has to iterate, and the clarity of the brief it receives. Decisions include who gets hired, which projects get design investment, and what counts as done.
If you believe that, then the lead role is not a sacrifice of craft for management. It is a different kind of craft: the craft of building the conditions under which good design happens reliably. That framing did not make every difficult meeting easier. But it made the role coherent in a way that "I used to design screens and now I manage people" never quite did.
