Congratulations. Here you are.
Head of Design.
Maybe your brand new email signature says “Vice President”. Maybe it says “Chief”. But what it clearly says is this: You have arrived. You’re a design executive.
But wait a minute. What does that even mean?
The two words seem to come from different worlds. Design: creative, exploratory, sometimes a little chaotic. Executive: analytical, rational, very very orderly. How can you be both? Have you ever seen anyone be both?
You can probably name some famous design executives. You’ve probably already thought of Jony Ive, whose design leadership (and ability to work with Steve Jobs) made him crucial to Apple’s renaissance in the 2000s. You may also know about Claudia Kotchka, who played a similar role in helping turn around the consumer goods giant Procter and Gamble as their first design executive around the same time. And then there’s Dieter Rams, who practically defined the foundations of modern industrial design while he was head of design for Braun for more than 30 years.
But those examples stand out precisely for their rarity. Design executive success stories are hard to find because design executives are hard to find—and nowhere more so than in digital product design. Ive, Kotchka, and Rams became design executives through the design of physical products, an area with a century-plus body of knowledge and established best practices in the world of manufacturing. That’s not what digital product design looks like today.
Digital product development is new. Digital product design is newer. Digital product design executive leadership, well, that’s the newest of all. People find their way into design leadership by many paths, but broadly speaking, the chances are low that you’ve even worked in an organization with executive design leadership before finding your way into the role. (Neither Ive nor Kotchka had, by the way.) That chances that you’ve worked in an organization with a mature approach to executive design leadership are even lower. If you’re feeling like you don’t know what this job looks like, it’s probably because you’ve never seen it done.
Or if you have, you haven’t seen it done well. Any design executive you have seen has had even fewer models to draw on than you did. As a result, many of them went looking for models outside design. They modeled themselves on the style of marketing leaders or sales leaders they had seen be successful with the persuasive tactics a design leader needs. They modeled themselves on their partners in product and engineering, in their efforts to demonstrate their ability to get things done. Or they modeled themselves on captains of industry like Intel’s Andy Grove or GE’s Jack Welch. And they struggled when those models didn’t fit the needs of design.
The models to follow are few and far between because few have been where you’re going. There won’t be a formula. There won’t be a roadmap. Uncertainty abounds, and will continue to.
What are you going to do about it?
Because through all this uncertainty, this much is certain: it’s going to be up to you.
It can feel lonely stepping into leadership. I help my clients thrive even when it feels like they have to face it all alone. The first step on your journey is my free 1-hour introductory session, which you can book right now.
Jesse James Garrett 