Early in my career, I measured my impact by what I could reveal: screens, flows, prototypes, i.e. visible work that made people go, "You did this?”

With time, I realised that design leadership is not about layers or wireframes. It's about clarity, alignment, and momentum, which are hard to see.

You start leading not only down, but across and up:

• Persuading product managers that MVP doesn't equal "bare minimum"

• Encouraging engineering teams to recognise the long-term price of forgoing edge cases

• Collaborating with marketing to ensure the tale pitched outside mirrors the experience inside.

Most of this is done in the background. There's no Figma file to demonstrate how you re-framed a conversation or negotiated scope without undermining the user's experience.

And that's what makes it difficult.

Influence > Execution

Design tends to be a slow-burning success factor. While product and engineering demonstrate effect through release or velocity, the impact of design is systemic. It manifests in retention, satisfaction, ease, and trust. These aren't always near-term or tangible.

This means that influence becomes your go-to toolkit. You use influence to avoid arguments, not to win them, but to keep the user in focus when the rest of the world is already pulling the team away from it.

At times, influence is about encouraging an engineer to refine that micro-interaction. At times, it's about creating a business argument for that single additional onboarding step because it minimises long-term drop-offs. And at times, it's about recognising when to release.

The Shift from Doing to Enabling

I first experienced the shift at Domino's. I needed to create a team from scratch and guide a redesign, reimaging how people order food.

Everyone was looking. The stakes were high. But I understood early on: it wasn't about how well I could design. It was about how well I could empower the team to deliver.

My job was clearing blockers, aligning stakeholders, and making the designers feel safe exploring big ideas. I wasn't the visible hand anymore; I was the one who made sure everyone else could be visible.

Measuring the Invisible

So how do you know it's working? You begin to see effects in unexpected ways:

• A stakeholder parrots the user language you planted weeks earlier

• An engineer champions interaction refinement, yet you didn't push back

• A designer becomes bold enough to confront a PM and gets her way

These events won't find their way onto Dribbble. But they're indicators that you're building a culture for design, even when it's not glamorous.

Success is not what you create; it's what you help others develop.

Coaching Without Stepping in

As a leader, you naturally want to intervene when progress slows. However, actual growth occurs when you don't.

Instead, you coach with questions, not solutions. You see effort, not perfection.

Designers who iterate through criticism, work through uncertainty, and are resilient are leaders worth noting. And as a leader, one of the most powerful things you can do is pass the credit forward.

The Quiet Fulfilment There's a trade-off

You sacrifice the visible wins. You're no longer feted for the most beautiful screen. But in exchange, you have something else: systems that hum without you, teams that think independently of you, and products that achieve because of you. That's the unseen work of design leadership. It's understated. It isn't easy. And it's worthwhile.