Jesse James Garrett

What if you didn’t have to leave design craft behind when you became an executive design leader?

If you’ve been following my recent threads on design executives’ responsibility for quality, you’ve seen a diverse range of opinions. Some argued that taking a hands-off approach to design quality was tantamount to abdication of a critical leadership responsibility, while others agreed (to varying degrees) with my take that letting go of design quality was necessary for the design executive to elevate their engagement with the rest of the business.

Tim Allen, global head of design and research for Instacart, provided an interesting perspective on this in our recent conversation on our design leadership podcast Finding Our Way. As Peter and I discovered, Tim’s leadership approach seems to counter some of what we thought was possible for executive design leaders who want to stay engaged with the craft of design. A few elements stood out as critical to his success:

Tim tells us the key to his ability to engage with the craft of design is selective attention: diving into the design details when it truly matters. Specifically, he prioritizes his engagement with design quality based on business priority. So where the craft really matters, in ways that are visible to his peers beyond design, that’s when he leans on his design acumen to elevate the work of his team.

Another tactic that has helped Tim stay connected with the craft is keeping his engagement as low-friction for his team as possible. That means not demanding highly polished presentations of work from his design team, and in fact creating a culture of messiness within the team that enables him to drop into work in progress with minimal disruption to schedules and deliverables.

Tim also leaned on his leadership complement, the person he called his “hammer”: someone who could maintain operational focus while he shifted his attention toward design craft. Having another leader he could rely on to watch the weather up on the surface while he did the deep diving was vital for Tim to be able to know where he could go deep and where he might need to pull out.

When designers talk about quality, we’re often talking about the standards of quality that are visible to us as designers—to an informed, discerning eye—but not to others. So for many design leaders, the fear of letting go of design quality is the fear that they’re the only ones looking after something that no one else sees.

The challenge with solving problems that other people don’t think exist is that the solutions tend not to impress them either. So then I have to wonder: If no one else can see either the problem you’ve prioritized or the effect of its solution, what exactly are you fighting for?