Leadership
Leadership is a different shape of the same work.
I've been in some form of leadership role for most of my career. Half of it I spent learning that the title is just a label on top of a job that has already changed underneath you. The hands aren't always on the pixels anymore, but the work still has to feel coherent—and that part is mine.
Most of the job is knowing how to balance: when to push a team toward more and when to hold, because adding more isn't always the answer; when to shift your attention from the roadmap to the person in the room who needs something different; when to stay close to the numbers and when to remember that every metric has a human behind it. That calibration doesn't come from rules. It comes from paying attention.
I think of my role as more like a conductor than a soloist. The musicians don't need me to show them how to play. They need me to know the score, hold the tempo, and make space for them to do what they're best at. The four principles below are how I've tried to do that.
Build the team first, then the work follows.
Most of the design problems I've had have actually been team problems in disguise. The wrong people in the wrong seats, or the right people without the conditions to do their best work. I spend a disproportionate amount of energy on hiring, leveling, and growing the people I work with. That investment looks slow from the outside, but the teams I've spent the most time on are the ones that shipped the work I'm most proud of.
Direction over direction-giving.
A clear north star beats a hundred design reviews. If the team knows where we're going and why, the path is theirs to find, defend, and change their minds about. I try to spend more time naming the destination than describing the route. Direction-giving is hours of weekly meetings. Direction is a sentence the team can recite three months later, and I'd rather have the sentence.
Earn trust by giving it.
The designers I've worked with have grown faster when I've stepped back early. Waiting until someone has 'earned' more responsibility usually means I'm using past evidence to predict future capacity, and people grow into the room you make for them. Promotion isn't a reward I hand out, it's a status I help someone claim. Trust is also given upward: if I want my team to be honest with me about what's not working, I have to be the first one to say it.
Stay close to the business.
Design that doesn't move the metric is decoration. Not every decision needs to be justified by a number, but design as a function only earns its seat by being inseparable from the work the business is doing. I work alongside stakeholders as a peer, not as a translator. That means being literate in the things that aren't design, too: unit economics, roadmap tradeoffs, and what's actually possible in the stack. Caring about those is how design earns the right to lead.
Most of what I'm sure of about leadership, I learned from being on teams where someone else lived it well, or from being on teams where no one did. Both are useful teachers.
These principles are notes to myself first. Then, a way to be honest with the people I work with about how I'm going to show up.