Writing
Three Principles for Design Leadership
What it really takes to lead design at scale—from craft to executive influence.
Tags
Design Leadership
Design Operations
Organization Design
Read Time
7 mins
Leading design at scale means doing more than just managing work—it means designing the conditions for great work to happen. From navigating organizational change to safeguarding team focus, leadership is less about control and more about clarity. The best leaders know when to push, when to protect, and when to get out of the way.
What’s Required of Design Leaders?
Search «leadership» on Harvard Business Review, and you’ll get nearly 12,000 results. Leadership is widely discussed—but what about design leadership? What makes a great design leader, and how does their role differ from other leadership disciplines?
After founding and growing the UX practice at Wondersauce—helping the firm scale from a 12-person design team to an 87-person cross-functional organization before its acquisition—and later being asked to turn around Etsy’s Product Design Organization during a period of transformation, I’ve seen firsthand what makes design leadership uniquely challenging—and uniquely impactful.
At Etsy, I wasn’t just the most senior product designer; I was also a founding member of the Strategy & Operations team, responsible for shaping Etsy’s corporate strategy and orchestrating company-wide operations. In this role, I reported directly to our COO Raina Moskowitz and had a front-row seat to how top executives operate, watching CEO Josh Silverman build and lead a world-class executive team.
From these experiences, I’ve found that great design leadership requires three things:
Deep craft knowledge: You don’t have to be a great designer to be a great design leader, but it helps—immensely.
Executive-level advocacy: You must push for design at the highest levels, ensuring the team has the resources, influence, and recognition to thrive.
Shielding teams from external pressures: Great leaders act as a firewall, protecting teams from distractions, executive churn, and external pressures so they can do their best work.
Deep craft knowledge: You don’t have to be a great designer, but it sure helps.
Great design leaders don’t just manage designers—they elevate the craft while making strategic decisions that accelerate business impact. I was drawn to Etsy in part because of Randy Hunt, its first Head of Product Design. His book, Product Design for the Web, was one of the first to define product design as a distinct discipline, separate from UX or interaction design. I was fortunate to work with Hunt for a year before he eventually left Etsy, witnessing firsthand how his leadership shaped the company’s craft-focused culture. His influence extended beyond Etsy, shaping New York’s Silicon Alley design community and attracting many of the brightest designers across the country. Etsy’s deep commitment to design excellence resonated with them, and many were also Etsy sellers themselves, creating and selling beautifully crafted products—reinforcing the company’s unique connection between craft and commerce.
This dedication to craft shaped Etsy’s entire brand and product experience. Unlike other tech companies that leaned into sterile, corporate aesthetics, Etsy felt organic, warm, and human. This wasn’t an accident—it was the result of design leadership that deeply valued craft.
After Hunt’s departure, however, the Product Design Organization lacked leadership. With both the Heads of Buyer Design and Seller Design leaving, there was no senior design leadership in the Product Organization. The result was drift—employee engagement dropped, designers felt a lack of advocacy, and cross-functional leaders saw slipping quality. When Josh Silverman arrived as CEO in 2017, major changes were coming, and Etsy’s Product Design Organization needed a leader to navigate them.
That’s when the Executive Team asked me to step in as interim Head of Product Design. Over the next several months, I reorganized the team, realigned it to Etsy’s Lean portfolio of initiatives, revamped our operations and critique process, and authored the organization’s first career ladder, ensuring clear growth pathways. I also led a global search for a permanent Head of Product Design, ensuring they would inherit a high-performing, structured team.
By the time I handed off the team to its new leader, employee engagement scores had rebounded, increasing by 7% from 76 to 83%. According to Culture Amp’s New Tech benchmark this score placed the Product Design organization in the top 16% of surveyed companies. The team had also grown by 17% to 40 designers and design managers, and most importantly, design had regained its seat at the table—operating as a strategic partner alongside its peers in Product Management, Engineering, and UX Research.
My leadership approach worked because I was a practitioner first, a manager second. Even when designers didn’t immediately embrace every decision I made, they trusted my judgment—because they knew I had been in their shoes. My credibility wasn’t granted—it was earned through experience.
For example, one of the operational shifts I led was migrating the team from Sketch to Figma. Changing tools mid-project is disruptive—designers have to relearn workflows, rebuild files, and redevelop muscle memory. There were downstream effects, too—engineers had to familiarize themselves with a new tool. Some senior designers voiced their opposition to me through direct feedback, concerned about the disruption and the perceived loss of control over their workflows. But I strongly believed real-time collaboration would accelerate decision-making, eliminating the need for heavy documentation and redlining.
This shift was directly aligned with one of the core principles of the Agile Manifesto:
«The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.»
While face-to-face wasn’t always possible in a remote-friendly company, Figma was the next best thing—allowing designers to co-create in real-time with product managers and engineers.
At first, I encountered resistance, but once a pilot initiative demonstrated how real-time collaboration could replace excessive documentation and speed up decision-making, adoption took off. Two years later, this shift contributed to a 120% increase in experiment velocity—proof that the right tools, adopted with conviction, can fundamentally change how teams work together.
This shift also positioned our team for a seamless transition to 100% remote work when COVID-19 hit. While other organizations scrambled to adapt, Etsy’s Product Design team was already working asynchronously, sharing work in real time, and making decisions collaboratively—without needing in-person meetings or heavy documentation. This foundation enabled business continuity at scale, ensuring the team could maintain momentum even in the face of unprecedented disruption.
Championing teams at the highest levels of an organization
Early in my tenure as interim Head of Product Design, I made it a priority to personally offboard departing senior designers. These were difficult conversations, but they offered valuable insight into why they were leaving and what they expected from leadership. One of the most memorable lessons came from Jess Harllee, who described three essential roles of great managers: sponsor, mentor, and advocate.
A sponsor creates career-defining opportunities—ensuring designers are given high-impact projects and visibility in leadership forums. A mentor guides professional growth, offering feedback, coaching, and strategic direction. An advocate ensures the team has the resources, recognition, and strategic influence needed to thrive.
Advocating for individuals is critical, but great design leaders go further. They advocate for the entire function of design, ensuring it has influence at the executive level, budget to grow, and a seat at the table in company-wide decision-making.
Advocating for Resources
Securing resources is a foundational act of leadership, and it extends far beyond headcount. Great design leaders push for competitive compensation, ensuring salary bands reflect market rates and that career progression is clear and fair. They remove friction in tooling and software access, ensuring teams have what they need without bureaucratic delays. They prioritize learning and development, ensuring designers have budgets for conferences, professional coaching, and mentorship programs. And they invest in engagement and culture, funding internal design summits, team offsites, and initiatives that foster community and growth.
Much of this work is invisible to the team—intentionally so. Done well, it allows designers to focus on doing their best work without being weighed down by operational inefficiencies.
Promotions: One of the most powerful forms of advocacy.
One of the most tangible ways a design leader can advocate for their team is through successful promotions. At Etsy, I promoted five designers to senior roles, advanced a manager to director, and helped a staff designer transition to management—maintaining an 87.5% promotion success rate.
Promotions don’t happen in isolation. They require rigorous tracking of individual impact, alignment with company expectations, and strong cross-functional advocacy. Design leaders need to understand the business impact of every designer’s work, map their competencies against the career ladder, and build an evidence-based case to ensure promotions are won. This is especially critical in cross-functional promotion cycles, where designers must compete with engineers and PMs for recognition and advancement.
High-performing designers who don’t see a clear path for growth will leave for companies that do. Structuring career progression transparently is one of the strongest retention strategies—and a direct form of advocacy.
Executive-level Advocacy
Advocacy doesn’t just happen within the design team—it happens across the company. The best design leaders ensure executives, cross-functional leaders, and decision-makers understand design’s impact—not just in terms of UX improvements, but in business outcomes.
At Etsy, I made sure the Executive Team saw design as a driver of revenue, cost savings, and strategic advantage. While CEO Josh Silverman had a strong product background and deeply understood the value of design, other executives didn’t. Rather than assuming design’s contributions were self-evident, I made them explicit.
In tech, «you’re only as good as your last accomplishment.» If design leaders don’t actively promote their team’s impact, the function risks being overlooked—or worse, deprioritized when budget cuts arise.
Great design leaders don’t just fight for headcount—they fight for design’s place in the business strategy, ensuring the function is valued not as a service provider, but as a critical driver of growth.
Shielding Teams from External Pressures
If you’ve ever watched a Formula 1 race, you’ve likely seen a terrifying crash—a car colliding with a barrier, tumbling, its body disintegrating on impact, and the cockpit engulfed in flames. It’s a heart-stopping moment. But when the emergency crew arrives, they often pull the driver out unscathed, despite the inferno around them.
The reason? The firewall.
In racing, a firewall is a heat-resistant barrier that separates the engine compartment from the driver’s cockpit, shielding them from flames, excessive heat, and leaking fluids in the event of an accident.
Great leaders act as a firewall—protecting teams from distractions, executive churn, and external pressures, allowing them to focus on their work without being consumed by forces beyond their control.
Establishing and Safeguarding Etsy’s Design System
Etsy’s design system, Collage, serves as the foundation for the buyer and seller experiences across the platform. Like all design systems, it standardizes elements, interactions, and patterns—enabling product teams to prototype faster, experiment efficiently, and maintain consistency at scale. But Collage is unique because:
It defines two distinct experiences—one for buyers, one for sellers.
It was co-developed by brand and product design, ensuring Etsy’s aesthetic and functional experiences remained in sync.
However, Collage almost didn’t survive.
From Working Group to Mission-Critical Initiative
Before Etsy’s Agile transformation, the first iteration of Collage—the “Web Toolkit”—emerged from a grassroots effort. It began as a self-initiated project led by a handful of “unicorns”—designers who could code—who were frustrated with inconsistencies in buttons, forms, and layouts. Back then, product designers and engineers had the autonomy to push code directly to production. We also had 10% time—a policy inspired by Google, allowing us to dedicate work hours to passion projects, which fostered bottom-up innovation.
But when Etsy underwent a brand refresh in 2017, aligning the new visual identity with the product experience became a logistical nightmare. Something as simple as changing the button color from blue to orange took nearly a year to implement across Etsy’s vast product surface.
Why?
The design system lacked executive ownership—without clear reporting lines it was unclear if it was a design or engineering scope.
Cross-functional alignment was missing—brand and product design worked in silos, causing friction.
Product leadership questioned the value—without clear business outcomes, leadership deprioritized it
Seeing the risk, I took action. In the absence of formal authority, I used influence—writing a one-page white paper that:
Defined the problem: Etsy’s design system lagged behind its brand evolution, causing fragmentation.
Proposed a solution: A dedicated, cross-functional squad responsible for implementing the brand refresh and maintaining the system.
Made the case to leadership: Positioned the team as a key enabler of squad agility—helping Etsy respond to change faster while maintaining a distinct brand identity amid growing competitive threats.
My manager helped socialize the proposal to the executive team, and our COO, Linda Kozlowski, approved the creation of Etsy’s first dedicated Design Systems team.
The team went on to expand Collage beyond the web, bringing the system to iOS and Android in 2019 and introducing Dark Mode in 2020. Today, Collage continues to unify Etsy’s brand with its product experience across all platforms, ensuring consistency and cohesion at scale.
Shielding the Team from Executive Pressure
When I became interim Head of Product Design, I was surprised to find that the future of the Design Systems team was suddenly in jeopardy. As an IC, I had assumed that Collage was secure—an essential piece of Etsy’s infrastructure. But stepping into leadership quickly revealed a different reality: critical teams can be deprioritized overnight, not because they lack impact, but because their value isn’t always obvious to leadership—especially as priorities shift and new leaders take over.
Several executives believed that headcount should be reallocated to revenue-generating initiatives. Discussions about disbanding the team began, with leadership pushing for engineers to absorb design system work into feature teams. I realized then that protecting high-leverage teams like Design Systems wasn’t just about proving their usefulness—it was about making their strategic value impossible to ignore.
But I saw the hidden value of Collage—not just as a design asset but as a source of value creation.
Conversion rate impact: Minor UI changes, when executed efficiently, could drive measurable revenue gains.
Experiment velocity: By centralizing updates, teams could iterate faster rather than reinventing interfaces.
Cross-platform consistency: Ensuring a seamless experience across web and native apps.
During Etsy’s annual planning cycle, which culminates in the Lean Portfolio of Initiatives, I made the case that Collage should be elevated from a side project to a strategic initiative.
I framed the argument in business terms:
Improve code health
Increase experiment velocity
Improve conversion rates
Despite resistance, I shielded the team from skepticism, ensuring they remained focused on their work rather than political battles happening above them.
The Proof: Small Changes, Big Impact
By keeping the team intact, Collage played a pivotal role in experimentation success.
One example: a simple UI tweak—changing the color of the «Only 3 left» scarcity signal from peach to red—resulted in a 0.83% lift in conversion rate.
Using Collage, the change was implemented with minimal engineering lift and deployed across web and native platforms simultaneously.
One of my proudest moments came during a Product All Hands, when Etsy’s CPO publicly acknowledged:
«Our Design Systems team walks so squads can run.»
This was the ultimate validation—not just of the team’s value but of the importance of protecting them.
The success of Etsy’s Collage wasn’t just in the UI it standardized and code it refactored—it was in the experimentation velocity, strategic alignment, and revenue impact it enabled. And that only happened because a team had the space to do what they do best.
Leaders must be firewalls—not only shielding teams from distractions but advocating for their survival when their work is misunderstood. Because in the end, great work isn’t just about what gets built—it’s about what’s protected, nurtured, and allowed to thrive.
Leadership: The invisible work behind the work.
Great design leadership isn’t just about craft, advocacy, or shielding teams—it’s about knowing when to lean into each one. It’s about balancing execution with influence, vision with pragmatism, and protection with empowerment.
At Etsy, I saw firsthand that great leaders do more than shape products—they shape organizations. They ensure that design isn’t just present, but impactful—that it has a voice in business strategy, a seat at the executive table, and the operational support to thrive. They fight for their teams, not just by pushing for the best possible work, but by creating the conditions that make great work possible.
If you’re leading a design team, your role isn’t just to inspire—it’s to create the space for meaningful impact. Push for excellence in craft. Champion design at the highest levels. And when external forces threaten to derail your team, act as the firewall that keeps them focused, motivated, and moving forward.
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