Product and design are consolidating under technology leaders across the industry. The design leaders who keep their voice will be the ones who translate it.
Most of us in design have spent our careers reporting into design or product leadership. So when the org chart changes and the line runs into a technology leader instead, the first reaction in the room tends to be about loss. Design’s voice sits one step further from the top. The three-way tension between product, design, and engineering, the kind that produced good debate, gets flattened under a single person. In rooms like this across the industry, someone eventually says it plainly: whatever the announcement says, this is absorption by the engineering org.
I’m living a version of this right now, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that times are changing and I have to work through it like everyone else around me. The pattern is everywhere this year. Companies are collapsing the two-in-a-box at the top of product and technology because the dual review was slow, and the argument is hard to dismiss. The example I used with my own team was concrete: a design went through a full review cycle, then stalled waiting for a second leader’s eyes. We had the people and the talent ready to go; what we didn’t have was the process or the leadership layer to move on it. A design leader on my team added the upside I hadn’t said yet: one step removed beats two steps removed through a game of telephone.
Still, in our design leadership meeting a manager on my team raised the thing everyone was thinking. At a prior company, they said, product and engineering leadership just spoke such different languages that design’s needs got lost on the way up. That’s the real risk, and it’s where the framing I landed on this week starts.
Design needs to arrive as infrastructure, not as a feeling.
I came out of school 100 years ago as a developer and spent many days in that seat before I ever led a design team, and to be honest that’s been one of the more useful things about me as a leader. A technology leader is already funding systems, infrastructure, and things that scale. If design’s needs show up in that vocabulary, as a gate in the pipeline, a signal tracked in the issue tracker next to velocity, a playbook engineers can run, they land as an engineering problem with an engineering shape. Show up with “design doesn’t feel like it has a seat” and you’ve handed over a complaint, and complaints get scheduled for later.
Two more moves go with the translation.
The first is a principle I shared with the team on Monday: our job as leaders is to help this person succeed at a job that just got much bigger. That means understanding what they need from us, and it also means noticing what they’re not asking for and giving them that anyway. Our new product and technology leader was candid in an AMA this week that at senior levels the role is to align, coordinate, and make the hard call when people disagree, and to lean on the experts around the table for the rest. Read that generously and it’s an invitation. The design expertise has to come from us, packaged so they can act on it.
The second is to say – loud enough so people in the back hear it – what we want to keep distinct. If product and technology are more tightly merged and the person at the top is a technologist, what do we keep separate so we don’t lose healthy debate in the system? I’ve been thinking about that question a lot since the news landed (and I suspect the answer gets better once we’ve lived in the structure for a quarter). The stage gates where design judgment has to stay in the loop are a start. So is being honest with the team that we’ll probably move slower before we move faster, while everyone unlearns the old model.
The worry itself is fair; it just doesn’t travel up the chain in the form of a worry, and infrastructure does.
The teachable part
When design reports into a technology leader, bring infrastructure asks (pipeline gates, signal next to velocity, playbooks) instead of feelings, then name what you want to keep distinct.