Vision (Head)strategic direction of the design programme
First week as design manager: a hiring pipeline stalled at offer stage, a critique session that ran over and produced no decision, an executive asking for a Q3 vision the team hadn’t written, two designers whose projects were drifting in different directions, and a Slack message from a product partner who felt design had gone quiet. Five different problems. No map.
Design leadership is five jobs. Most leaders do it poorly less from lack of ability than because the five distinct responsibilities that arrive at once are rarely spelled out, or set out in a way that lets you see which one you’re neglecting.
The five domains run at the same time, every week, at every level of management. What changes between levels is the scale of each. A week at Design Manager and a week at VP of Design both pass through all five, addressing different questions within each.
The first domain is Vision: the strategic direction of the design programme, where the team is trying to go in two to five years. Vision answers the question every senior designer and cross-functional peer wants answered within their first weeks: what kind of design function is this going to be, and where does my work fit? The answer cannot be “we care about craft” or “we’re user-focused.” Those are table stakes.
Vision pins down the specific bet the team is making: which dimension of quality it optimises for, which part of the product’s future it builds toward, which kind of practitioner it becomes known for. It sets this out concretely enough that a hiring decision, a priority argument, or a resource request can be grounded in it. Vision is Purpose (6.1) at team scale, the same discipline now working at the scale of the function itself.
12.1 — Vision (Head) strategic direction of the design programme · H3