Maker First Mindset

If you are not designing, are you still a designer?

No. Designers design things. If you have stopped designing, cause your time won’t allow it, then you have also stopped being a designer.

When moving from IC to a leadership role, the question arises:

• If leadership is a craft, will it be my only craft?

• Will my time be spent only about people problems, organisational complexity and stakeholder management?

• Where is design in all of this?

Craft is the intersection of skill and experience. Craft is skill honed through practice. Whether it’s furniture making or design systems, craft is what turns effort into excellence. In digital product design, craft includes technical skill, strategic creativity, care, attention to detail and a commitment to high-quality outcomes. Craft is what differentiates good from great.

Leadership deserves the same respect, that’s why I see leadership as a craft too. It is not a demotion from making, it’s a different kind of making.

Craft is what differentiates good from great.
Taste is what helps us know the difference.
And both need practice to stay sharp.

To be an effective design leader, one must have strong craft and good taste. (A great read on Taste: Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu) Taste is about developing the ability to recognise what’s good, why it’s good and what it takes to get there. Taste may feel intuitive, though that intuition is built through exposure, critique and iteration. The best teams systemise taste.

As AI accelerates execution and handles the mundane, taste becomes a key differentiator for design teams. Everyone’s talking about this, anyone can generate, but fewer can curate, critique, and elevate. That’s true for now. Let’s not assume AI won’t learn taste; it will. Today’s tools may produce generic outputs, but they’re rapidly evolving. Soon, they’ll refine, judge and iterate with increasing sophistication.

So what sets us apart then? It’s not just having taste, it’s the ability to break it. To question, provoke and shift the visual norm. Think of the Renaissance: paintings were about harmony, realism and order. Then came modernism, abstraction, and rebellion. A movement that disrupted what was considered "good."

This is our edge as human designers: we don’t just follow taste, we challenge it. We invent the next wave. That instinct to play, disrupt and redefine is your creative superpower. Use it.

In my own growth journey while leaning in my growth as a leader I did not walk away from my craft. And I’m very glad I did not. Looking back here are some tips on how you can do the same:

1. The obvious: Practice your craft, stay hands-on

   To lead through design, you must stay connected to the craft. And to improve your craft and your taste, you need to be designing. Even if leadership becomes your second craft, you should never stop designing. No matter your title: Manager, Director, VP, Head of Design, CDO. Know the tools, try new things. Your design team needs to know you can do their work and cover for them if and when needed. They need to see that you still got it.

   • Jam with your team. Sketch, reframe, co-work, co-design.

   • Run small design projects or do your own personal project. Try new tools, evolve as the tech evolves, adapt fast. Book your time in your calendar, even 2-3 hours a week to learn a new tool, try a new flow, even 1-2 hours a week does wonders.

   • Again book the time to also improve your taste. Go to daily blogs, websites, portfolios. Always study what’s great, what makes something work well. Stay inspired. Find inspiration from different fields.
     

2. When coaching, lead through your craft

   Use your 1-1s and coaching sessions to lead through your craft. When your team sees that you care about the work, not just the operations, they trust your eye. They respect your feedback. When you raise the bar, they raise theirs.

   
   Leading design through design isn’t about doing it all yourself. It’s about staying close enough to keep your judgment grounded. If you never touch the work, you lose your edge. Taste atrophies. Feedback becomes vague. Your influence shrinks.

   • Make sure to spend time on the design outcomes, choose an area and dive deeper for a period of time. Tell this to your team openly: “This month, this quarter I’ll be focusing on X area” “I’ll now lead from the front and take these actions, overtime I’d like to hand them over to you…”

   • Hold your weekly Design Critique and feedback sessions, obviously. And do follow up after, pick a designer to co-work for the week. Ask them to work together on something, and go to that session from a place of curiosity. Bring your care for good design, bring the spirit of a good designer: curious, open, fun to work with.

   • Design critique works best when it's specific and grounded in principles, what’s working, what’s not and why. Instead of saying something ‘feels off’ or is ‘nice,’ describe the visual tension, hierarchy, spacing, or interaction pattern that’s causing the impression. Precision in critique leads to sharper design decisions.

3. Build Toward a Strong Link Team

   In sports, there’s a concept called weak link vs. strong link teams. In weak link sports like soccer, one weak player can cost you the game. Due to the game's continuous flow and the necessity for coordinated team play, a single player's mistake can significantly impact the outcome. In strong link sports like basketball, a star player can dominate the game. A team's success can be significantly influenced by its best players. The game's structure allows star players to have a more direct and substantial impact on the game's outcome. (A good read on this)

   This concept translates well to design teams. Early on, most teams function like weak link teams. Your time goes into aligning people, building connective tissue, and patching gaps. As the leader, you're the link that holds it together. That’s natural. You’re setting the foundation.

   Maturity comes when you shift toward a strong link model that is about amplifying greatness rather than ego. Your best designers begin lifting others. Stars become coaches. The team starts scaling quality, not just shipping.

   That’s when you earn the space to focus on craft, product thinking and vision. First fix the gaps; then, shape a culture where your strong links raise others and where you lead by raising the bar.
   

Final Reflections

Don’t let leadership responsibilities disconnect you from what made you great in the first place. Make space for your craft. You may still be a leader if you're not designing, but you're no longer the kind of designer your team can learn from.

Stay in it. Stay real. Design on.