My Five Commitments to a Team

Leadership is about designing the relationships and conditions that enable others to do their best work, rather than having all the answers.

After years of leading design teams, I’ve learned that great leadership hinges on making and consistently honoring clear commitments. These commitments are not just empty promises; they must be tangible practices that actively shape how work gets done. Here are five commitments that have defined my approach and delivered real results for my teams.

Personal: Prioritizing Team Members’ Wellbeing and Growth

Every week, I meet one-on-one with every team member. These conversations balance project progress, problem-solving, career development, and genuine connection. Creating space for whatever is on their mind is crucial. I’m also always available outside these meetings.

Resilience begins with team health. I actively encourage realistic bandwidth assessments to prevent burnout and overcommitment. When designers are stressed, overworked, or afraid to speak up about problems, nobody brings their best work.

I demonstrate vulnerability by openly sharing when I’m uncertain or learning alongside the team. As the Figma team notes, modeling candor yourself creates the psychological safety necessary for creativity to flourish.

I commit to providing access to resources, growth opportunities, and fostering belonging for every team member. Diverse perspectives make better design decisions and that every person deserves conditions that enable their success.

Product: Elevating Design Craft

Designers must have the agency to assure the quality of their work if they are to take responsibility for its consequences. I curate teams around products based on knowledge, experience, and career goals. These communities persist beyond project boundaries. When teams dissolve after a project ships, we lose the accumulated knowledge of how to work together. The continuity of collaboration is a design intervention in itself.

I trust designers with full agency over their work quality while maintaining clear success metrics. This means providing frameworks and tools while respecting individual approaches and creative processes. I translate design excellence into measurable business value through clear metrics and outcomes, helping the team understand their product’s impact on direct, indirect, and invisible stakeholders.

Most critically, I support scope reduction over quality compromise. It’s far better to ship a well-considered, tightly scoped solution than a half-baked, ambitious one.

Team: Building Intimate, Autonomous, and Continuously Learning Teams

Great teams don’t happen by accident, or from trust falls and personality assessments.

I begin with a group workshop that leverages Shultz’s theory of group formation. This builds intimacy and cohesion through structured engagement with how groups form and function. This isn’t team therapy; it’s a deliberate act of designing the social infrastructure necessary for collaborative work.

I use just enough process—trusting team members to make sound decisions and escalate challenges appropriately. Too much oversight turns creativity into a factory environment. I coach designers to develop an editorial sensibility about their work so they drive decisions independently rather than constantly seeking permission.

I create time and space for experimentation, industry learning, and craft development. I establish both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration channels that amplify diverse voices.

In weekly Design Sync meetings, we focus relentlessly on outcomes, not outputs. Individual feedback stays private.

Public performance reviews disguised as team meetings destroy psychological safety faster than anything else.

I implement regular feedback loops, including monthly opportunities for team members to provide input on my leadership. This bidirectional accountability is essential.

Strategy: Design as a Driver of Future Vision

Strategy requires collective intelligence. The people who will execute the strategy must be convinced of its value, not merely compliant with its directives.

I build robust research infrastructures that inform product decisions and validate design solutions. This isn’t research as an afterthought; it’s research as the foundation of strategic thinking.

My workshops are collectively designed to create a shared vision and solidarity of what great design means for the company. They acknowledge that strategy is a design problem that requires multiple perspectives to solve effectively. I empower the design team to define product roadmaps through experience strategy and user insights, proving design’s strategic viability through clear research findings and measurable outcomes.

Regular Manager Feedback sessions with the team and broader organization, including product and engineering, are critical. Team members assess our strategic goals and current progress, and this feedback is integrated into both our strategy and my management style.

Organization: Building Design’s Influence

Design success relies on the quality of the relationship between engineering and product.

The more successful it becomes, the more it reverberates to other departments. For both of these core departments, I operate under the premise that design is part of an engineering and product solution that defines the overall product experience.

I develop strong cross-functional relationships, helping partners see design as integral to their solutions. I share design thinking and rationale, not just deliverables, through transparent communication and collaborative workshops. I create collective vision-setting processes where teams build buy-in by participating in the strategies they’ll execute.

I scale the team strategically with clear capability gaps in mind, ensuring purposeful growth over rapid expansion. Every hire should address a specific capability gap and come with a clear plan for impact.

The Way Forward

These five commitments—Personal, Product, Team, Strategy, and Organization—are material practices that form the reality of how I’ve managed design teams. They ensure that individual growth occurs alongside team success and that design maintains its strategic position within the business. What matters most is that a commitment without consistent action is just an aspiration. The promise of weekly 1:1s means nothing if you cancel them when things get busy. The promise of a collective strategy means nothing if you override decisions when you disagree.

The real test is practicing them consistently when systems are breaking down, deadlines are looming, and stakeholders are panicking.

This is exactly when your commitments become most consequential and when most leaders abandon them entirely. This approach requires us to take seriously the material reality of how leadership actually functions, beyond the abstractions of management discourse. It demands acknowledging that how we organize work is itself design work, with real consequences for the futures we collectively build.