Why design leadership matters

There are a few skills I think of when thinking about great designers:

• Creativity
• Deep understanding of human behavior
• Storytelling

These powerful skills are honed through the trials of taking messy, complex problems and turning them into simple, elegant solutions. These skills make for fantastic leaders because we still serve the same user: people. Whether it be a team, an individual designer, a peer, or the CEO, the same toolkit matters. I've found creativity to be the ultimate superpower of design leaders, and their toolkit for expressing creativity is invaluable in leadership spaces.

I also philosophically believe that it's design leadership, not leadership. A false binary exists where moving into management means you must somehow give up hands-on design work, but I believe this is an antipattern. By giving up hands-on design work, you're giving up the ability to create and communicate design solutions.