Why Design Leadership Matters

As I sat down to start work on what would become this newsletter in the summer of 2024, I was in reflective mood having reached a milestone in my Design Leadership career. I was now a decade into my work at the helm of design organisations, and a mind-boggling 22 years into a career in technology which I had stumbled into halfheartedly. Having spent most of my career being the whipper-snapper at the boardroom table, I found myself now being - if not quite the elder statesman - a seasoned operator in an industry which can create the most fulfilling of careers, but also the most tumultuous. I felt a need to document how at that specific point in time I had come to think about Design Leadership, why it was such a critical ingredient in high functioning technology organisations, and what I felt we as a discipline and as a community needed to do better in the next ten years if we were to live up to our collective potential to do good in an industry seemingly intent on doing anything but.

Working in technology is an act of optimism, we sit at the forefront of progress in all sorts of areas of human advancement. Our job is to take the raw ingredients of new and unrefined technical capabilities and turn them into things which improve the lot of our fellow man, and yep, generate shareholder value along the way. At it’s best, this industry gives us a front row seat to the rapid advancement of society, and at worst it throws you and everyone else into a tumble-dryer which you can only hope finishes it’s cycle with your innards still in the right places.

Design Leadership is an essential ingredient in creating from this exciting maelstrom a place in which designers can do their best design work - where lucrative careers can be created for all sorts of people, and where in offices and slack channels largely made up of business types, teams of people who get excited about great design work get to get excited about getting to do great design work which enriches their professional lives whilst making the world a marginally better place.

I hope that this newsletter will provide the raw ingredients for you to create your own framework for design leadership, that it will be a comfort to those us you who are deep into your leadership journeys and for aspiring design leaders who are looking around and finding scant information on how to do this work, and to do it well. Whilst it is largely my own personal experience and a career positively littered with mistakes which have inspired the writing of this newsletter, it’s contents will also drawn from the experiences of my peers and colleagues, from brilliant conference talks, from prior art in this same category, and from rants over drinks in generally dingy bars spread across several countries and multiple decades.

Stuart.

---