The Translator's Burden: The real work of design leadership
Years of messy complexity taught me the real work of design leadership
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: what does a UX/product design leader (Principal, Architect, Manager, Director) actually do? Not the jargony job description version with trite bullet points about “driving design excellence” or “handling urgent deadlines with different stakeholders.” I mean the real work—the messy, pragmatic, relationship-heavy work that happens between the fancy portfolio case studies.
After two decades in this field, I’ve realized something. The most impactful work isn’t about creating beautiful interfaces or even innovative user experiences (though those matter). It’s about being a translator of pain into durable value. 💎
The pain points are often the same
Whether I’m working with a scrappy eager startup or a Fortune 500 legacy enterprise, the fundamental pains remain remarkably consistent:
Poor market fit: Teams hastily building beautiful, useless features or apps. MVPs that are minimum, but not viable. Products that ship fast but learn slow. AI magnifies this with excitedly vibe-coded concepts pushed out before understanding real needs.
Dev team blockages: Fuzzy roles, unclear ownership, and the dreaded “design by committee” paralysis. Everyone has opinions; no one has authority. Now with AI everyone is vibe-coding their own features with poor coordination; but who makes the final call?
Strategic drift: Endless feature debates masquerading as product strategy. Teams arguing about the what because they haven’t aligned on the why. Urgent aims to fold AI into roadmaps but for unvalidated customer goals.
Execution myopia: Getting lost in the weeds while the big picture dissolves into wishful thinking and powerpoint decks. Plus “AI mandates” that lack any sense of connection to true purpose.
Sound familiar? 😅
But here’s what I’ve learned: these aren’t really design problems. They’re organizational problems that manifest through design. And that’s exactly where experienced design leadership becomes valuable!
The real work: strategic translation
When you’ve been doing this long enough, you realize the job isn’t designing interfaces—it’s designing the conditions for good design to happen. It’s about creating what I call strategic translation—turning organizational pain into actionable value.
MVP definition: MVP framing with clear learning goals instead of feature checklists. Establishing direct customer feedback loops that actually influence product decisions. Building up a kind of learning velocity—the speed at which teams understand what really works.
Cross-functional alignment: Defining clear roles & decision rights so teams can move with confidence. Establishing predictable UX/Agile rituals that create shared rhythm, not bureaucracy. Building design systems that enable teams rather than constrain them.
Strategy translation: Facilitating structured workshops that surface hidden assumptions, dependencies, and tradeoffs. Running pre-mortems to identify blindspots before they become expensive mistakes. Creating frameworks for making tough choices with imperfect, incomplete information.
Vision inspiration: Crafting customer-validated prototypes that set direction, not just sell fancy concepts to eager executives. Sketching models & maps that help teams navigate complexity. Building shared mental models between design, product, and engineering.
Beyond the IC mindset
Here’s something they don’t teach you in design school: the transition from talented IC to strategic leader isn’t about getting better at design—it’s about getting better at enabling others to do their best work.
Early in my career, I thought senior designers were just really good at Photoshop (yes showing my age here 😅). Then I thought it was about being really good at user research, or information architecture, or design systems.
But the actual work? It’s about creating contexts where teams can make good decisions together. It’s about building processes that don’t feel like processes. It’s about facilitating alignment without becoming the dreaded HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion).
As I stated in my pragmatic designer’s manifesto: “it’s not about ‘making Engineering (or Product Management) love your design’. It’s about creating a context and process where everyone participates in an imperfect, iterative, compromise-heavy, constraint-based, decision-making model.” That’s the job.
The architectonics of leadership impact
Across my journey—from “team of one” startup catalyst to enterprise design director—I’ve consistently observed that senior-level design value emerges through three interwoven domains. They echo Buchanan’s orders of design as symbolic, material, action-oriented, and systemic expressions of strategic intent:
1. Design as symbolic intervention: Leading by making
Hands-on design leadership is about crafting artifacts that clarify ambiguity and catalyze momentum. At times, the most strategic move is to model a vision—fast. These prototypes aren’t vanity moves; they are symbolic interventions that speak louder than words, making the invisible tangible, while aligning teams through shared meaning and aesthetic coherence.
2. Design as conversational action: Framing shared understanding
Strategic alignment arises from curating conditions for generative dialogue. It’s not merely about hosting a workshop—it’s about shaping discourse, surfacing tradeoffs, and brokering clarity across disciplines. This is where design becomes an act of organizational choreography, engaging power, perception, and politics to shape collective futures.
3. Design as systemic enablement: Scaling culture & craft
Team enablement isn’t “ops for ops” sake. It’s the infrastructure of capability—creating rituals, roles, and rhythms that permit teams to thrive without bottlenecks. This is meta-design: defining the frameworks and feedback loops that support design to scale responsibly, beyond your own keyboard or whiteboard.
These three modes reinforce each other. You can’t convene serious strategic conversations without the grounding credibility of making artifacts. You can’t scale rituals without clarity on purpose & protocols. And you can’t sustain velocity without scaffolding that honors the humans doing the work, with care & intent.
Design leadership is a practice of architectural foresight, enacted across layers of meaning, matter, movement, and systems.
An uncomfortable truth about seniority
Here’s the real deal about becoming a design leader: you’ll spend more time in abstract problem-solving than you will in Figma. 🙃 There’s no tokenization model or Autolayout tool for this work.
You’ll facilitate more tough conversations than you’ll create wireframes. You’ll write more strategy documents than you’ll conduct user interviews. And that’s exactly as it should be. The individual contributor version of impact is about the quality of your output.
The senior leader version is about the quality of everyone else’s output—and the systems that enable it.
It’s not always as immediately gratifying as shipping a beautifully crafted interface. But when you help a team move from three months of feature debates to user-validated direction in three weeks? When you facilitate alignment that prevents six months of building the wrong thing? When you establish design operations that help designers focus on designing instead of process overhead?
That’s where the real leverage lives. 🔥
What this means for you
If you’re a mid-level designer wondering what comes next, or a senior designer questioning whether those formal management & leadership roles are worth it, here’s my take: start practicing translation now.
Look for the organizational pain points around you. Practice facilitating instead of just advocating. Build systems & processes, not just interfaces.
Learn to see the space between disciplines—that’s where the most valuable work often lives. 🙌🏽
And remember: there is no perfect design, no perfect organization, no perfect process. There’s only the messy, iterative work of making things a little better every day. Sometimes that happens pixel by pixel. Sometimes it happens conversation by conversation. Both matter, providing durable value if done well.
But at the senior level, your job is knowing which tool to reach for when—and building the conditions where others can make that choice confidently too.
✦ If you're navigating this transition yourself—or leading a team through it—I'm always happy to talk through the particulars. That's a lot of what my consulting & coaching work involves these days: helping designers & design orgs find their footing at these inflection points. Reach out to book a time >