What Youll Do
Make design visible where decisions are made: Build a mechanism, not a mood. A forum, a recurring report, a metric you introduce, a ritual that puts the groups contribution in front of the executive team on a schedule and in business language. Get design into the conversation before prioritization.
Raise the bar on the group: Move designers from executing tickets to defining problems and bringing options. Tell the difference between a designer who is weak and a good one who is stuck, and handle them differently. Set expectations explicitly, in writing, and hold to them.
Lead the leaders: Manage two team leaders with different styles, mentor and grow them.
Scale the infrastructure: Own the design system as infrastructure rather than documentation. Close the design to code gap (Figma to Storybook, component usage visibility, token migration) and keep asking which parts of execution an agent can carry.
Tie every major move to a number: Know which KPI a design decision is meant to move, how its measured, what the baseline was, and what you do when it doesnt move.
Decide how much process each problem earns: A small change in a familiar area and a large one in a new domain dont get the same treatment. Calibrate by risk and by what the team already knows, and be able to explain the call.
Proven executive presence: Youve made design visible to a leadership team that didnt ask for it, and you can name what you built to do it and what changed in their behavior afterward.
Experience managing managers: Director or VP level, leading a group through team leaders rather than leading designers directly.
Business literacy: You talk in metrics without being asked. Point to a design decision you led and tell us the baseline, what moved, by how much, and how you knew it was you.
Demanding leadership, not harsh leadership: You have a real story about someone you pushed who then grew, including what it cost you. You have another about someone who didnt make it, what you did, and on what timeline. This team is used to warm management. We want the demands without losing the trust.
Youve built with AI, not only adopted it: Something you put into a real workflow in the last year, including the part that broke and the part you killed. You can tell the difference between speeding up one task and redesigning how the work flows.
Current, curious and opinionated on craft and tooling: You dont have to be the strongest Figma operator in the room, and you wont be. You do have to know what changed in the last year, to have touched something yourself recently, and to hold a reasoned position on where a tool stops being the right answer.
You ask what worked before you say what to change: We want opinions, and criticism of what exists is welcome.
Excellent English, written and verbal.
