Design Leadership: Bridging Vision, Strategy, and People Management
Design leadership plays a core role in setting the direction and goals for both design teams and the broader organization. Beyond aesthetic outcomes, design leaders are responsible for defining vision, strategy, and values, ensuring alignment with business objectives and customer needs. This role also involves nurturing a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence, while mastering communication, facilitation, and influencing skills across multiple stakeholders.
This was the core theme of the latest UX Talk #39 hosted by POLI.design’s Experience Design Academy, featuring Elisabetta Olgiati, Head of Experience Design at TeamSystem, and Attilio Raiteri, Experience Design Manager at Sky Italia.
From Photocopies to Impact: Design Leadership as a Balancing Act — Attilio Raiteri
In non design-driven organizations, building an effective design team often begins in unlikely ways. Back in 2018, Sky Italia’s design team resembled more of a “photocopy shop” : tasked with producing quick wireframes and layouts on demand. Over the years, this perception has shifted. Today, Design Team has earned recognition as a key partner in delivering business value, even within a complex, corporate environment where agility often clashes with bureaucracy.
One of the core challenges of leading a design team in such contexts is managing perspectives over time. On a daily basis, every issue feels urgent and critical: internal conflicts, project blockers, shifting priorities. But stepping back and observing across months or quarters reveals a different truth: the slow but constant improvement of outputs and influence. Keeping this dual perspective is a fundamental skill for design leaders.
Another delicate balance lies in synchronizing expectations. For designers, a two-day delay feels like a significant wait. For the larger organization, however, those same two days barely register, business processes run at different speeds, where a week can stretch into months. In this tension, the design lead becomes the interface, often embodying organizational slowness in the eyes of their team, while navigating invisible layers of corporate complexity.
The evolution of Sky’s design team reflects this dynamic. From a fragile, unstructured group of six, the team expanded steadily, overcoming early challenges with strategic moves, such as appointing a resource manager to orchestrate daily priorities and deliveries. Milestones like the creation of a Research Lab in 2020 and the progressive internalization of design roles (moving from 75% external to fully internal teams) have marked the team’s growth, alongside continuous organizational reorganizations.
However, scaling does not equate to linear maturity. UX maturity remains a fluid, non-linear process, requiring constant assessment and care. It involves not only the company’s evolution but also the design team’s own capacity to iterate on its role and value.
The Butterfly Program: Turning Skepticism into Strength
An emblematic example of unconventional growth is the Butterfly Program, an internal reskilling initiative. Tasked with integrating five people from the customer care team into the design team, initial skepticism was inevitable. Digital skills were limited, and the team’s focus on research-intensive, specialized tasks seemed misaligned with their profiles.
Yet, this decision proved pivotal. Former customer care team employees brought with them 15 years of direct customer interaction, a deep understanding of user habits, and a pragmatic approach to problem-solving. Their contribution went beyond design: from improving content strategies to unlocking internal data platforms unknown to the design team. This experience highlighted a crucial leadership lesson: skills can be taught, but unique perspectives are priceless.
Rethinking the Design Leader’s Role
Over time, the focus of leadership shifts. The further one progresses, the less time is spent on design tools and the more on managing people, priorities, and relationships across business units. Tools like PowerPoint and Excel become as essential as design software, simply because they are the “lingua franca” of the broader organization.
The true role of a design leader lies not in mastering every new design tool, but in facilitating connections, translating user needs into business outcomes, and shielding the team from unproductive friction. Growth as a leader means stepping away from hands-on design and moving closer to people management, negotiation, and strategic influence.
One of the clearest indicators of successful leadership is reaching a point where the team’s designers are better at design than their manager. Leadership, then, becomes an exercise in fostering vision, mediation, and organizational alignment.
“At some point, I stopped learning new design tools. It’s not a problem — when you’re leading a team, the real success is hiring designers who are better than you. My job became making their work matter for the business.”
The unspoken truths of Design Leadership — Elisabetta Olgiati
Elisabetta Olgiati shares an experience-driven perspective on what it means to lead a design team, beyond methods and org charts. Her stories come from within TeamSystem, but it reflects the challenges many design leaders face across organizations. Here’s a dive into those hidden truths.
1. Direction is not given, it’s negotiated and often ambiguous
In any design team, there comes a moment when the question arises: who defines the direction? Is it the company? The market? The team itself? Sometimes, it’s not even clear whether a direction really exists, at least not in a stable, singular sense.
Setting direction takes time and strategic alignment, but it’s not just tactical work. Often, decisions emerge through intuition, shaped by personal style, character, and even impulsiveness. Some leaders move with data; others with gut feeling. Neither is wrong, both leave an imprint on the kind of leadership that forms.
In 2025, the team had evolved into 12 operational groups. Though the broader structure remained hierarchical, efforts were made to build distributed ownership: team-building moments, shared decision-making processes, and autonomous squads emerged. One focused on AI, another on defining team skills, small ecosystems of accountability within a wider system.
2. Success can look like failure and vice versa
The introduction of discovery research at TeamSystem was a long-awaited milestone. Before 2022, no structured research activities had taken place. One in 2022. One in 2023. Then, suddenly, four in 2024. And in 2025 Fifty-five discovery requests, a number that would have sounded impossible just a year before. But with scale came struggle. The team could not respond to all 55 opportunities. The process had followed research best practices too rigidly, slowing down the rhythm. Insights came too late. The methodology, borrowed from literature, clashed with business speed.
One core realization emerged: discovery must be lightweight, “rough enough to keep pace with the organization.” Mini-research moments, embedded in development cycles, proved more sustainable.
Another misstep: while strategic stakeholders like business and marketing were involved, the operations teams (those responsible for implementing processes) had been left out of the loop. As a result, the integration of research into everyday work was slower than expected.
3. Maturity is fragile and can go backwards
Institutionalizing something like discovery research isn’t just a matter of process. It depends on how much energy the design team is willing to invest, and whether that energy spreads across the company. It’s not just about design maturity , business maturity matters just as much.
Are the workflows structured? Are they standardized or still evolving? Are decisions centralized or distributed? These questions apply whether you’re in a startup or a large enterprise. In some cases, a highly structured environment resists change. In others, the lack of structure allows more flexibility, but only if the team has enough maturity to co-create something new.
Even after progress, regression is always a risk. A new manager replaces one who understood UX deeply. Suddenly, shared language, i.e. personas, journeys, insights… disappears. The dialogue breaks. Without relationships, even maturity can dissolve.
4. Leadership is lonely, even in a crowd
Surrounded by people, design leads often find themselves alone. Problems can’t be escalated freely: sharing too much with upper management might look like weakness, while sharing with the team might spread uncertainty. The mental load is constant: Should we take on this high-impact project that would raise the team’s visibility? Or would that risk burnout? Some questions have no easy answers.
In TeamSystem, as the team grew from 8 to over 50 people, the structure clearly needed rethinking. But sharing that too early would have caused panic. What does this mean for design leaders? Will they have to change how they work?
Instead, quiet reflection became the method. Ideas were discussed with a few trusted team members. A small inner circle emerged, a sort of advisory group. It wasn’t about hiding decisions but about protecting the team’s psychological safety while exploring change.
5. Supporting people to growth isn’t just a task but a responsibility you can fail at
One of the toughest truths in leadership is that good intentions aren’t enough. Assigning someone to a leadership path without dedicating enough time for proper training and support can lead to confusion, isolation, and ultimately, disengagement
Helping people grow requires space, not just opportunity. It requires removing obstacles, offering support, and sometimes saying no to other priorities. It’s not scalable. It’s personal.
Leadership means balancing care with clarity, support with responsibility… Often all at once.
If you are interested in these kind of insights follow our UX Talks organised by POLI.design’s Experience Design Academy. Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram to be updated about the upcoming UX Talks, which are always open to the public.
Curated by Alice Paracolli
