Jesse James Garrett

If the design executive isn’t looking out for design quality, just who the hell is? That’s the very good question many of you had for me after I wrote about these topics a few weeks ago.

In that piece, I argued that the ascent to executive-level leadership necessitated a shift for the leader from creative influence to organizational influence, and that meant no longer leading conversations about the quality of the team’s creative work.

This definitely left some readers thinking I was letting execs off the hook for bad design, or worse: suggesting that design quality no longer mattered at all! Not true. Instead, think of it this way:

You no longer serve the organization with your taste in design—you serve it with your taste in designers. That’s about who you hire, fire and elevate for sure. But it’s also about how much autonomy you grant and where.

In most large-scale organizations, the peak of creative influence along the management hierarchy is somewhere around the senior manager level, where your organizational influence is at its maximum while you are still directing individual contributors. Once you are purely managing managers, your conversations about design quality should be about *their* quality standards, not yours.

And although the emerging principal IC role is meant to mitigate it, in most cases strategic decision making lies with people who control the allocation of resources: money and people. Being invited into one typically entails acceptance of the other.

So if resource management is the devil’s bargain you have to accept in order to have strategic influence, you now have a whole job, with its own unique requirements and associated skillset, with its own stakeholders and necessary conversations—none of which involve design quality.

That means that where the design executive does intercede in design quality conversations, it necessarily has to be highly strategic, focused on issues that no one else in the design organization can address without that leader’s vantage point.

The scope and scale of the design team—meaning diversity of challenges and capabilities as well as sheer headcount—undeniably influences the extent to which the executive leader drives design decisions. In a company entirely focused on a single product still in its early stages, UI-level decisions *are* strategic interventions.

But for the enterprise-scale VP or CDO, those strategic interventions ought to be rare and noteworthy, because somehow a design decision slipped through the cracks in the knowledge and expertise of their team. The exec’s task is knowing where those interventions are needed, and preventing them in the first place by building a team of quality-focused leaders whose judgment they can trust.