Manage the Work, Not the People
Why the best design leaders act like midfielders — playmakers in the flow of the work — instead of coaches yelling from the sideline.
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The phrase that changed how I lead: manage the work, not the people.
When you manage people, you become a coach yelling from the sideline — reviewing from a distance, correcting after the fact, accumulating status meetings. When you manage the work, you’re a midfielder. You’re on the field, moving the ball, creating opportunities for others to score.
What this looks like in practice
Set clear expectations on outcomes. Not on process, not on hours, not on tools. The team should always be able to answer: what does done look like, and why does it matter to the business?
Provide tactical frameworks, not answers. A strong designer with a good framework will beat a strong designer with your specific solution — because they’ll apply it to the ten situations you never saw coming.
Make sense of complexity via systems. When the org is confused, the leader’s job is to draw the map — name the forces at play, make the implicit explicit, and give people a shared model to reason from.
Why this matters at a startup
At a startup, headcount is scarce and ambiguity is free. A leader who needs to control every decision becomes the bottleneck for the entire design org. A leader who manages the work — outcomes, quality bar, frameworks — multiplies instead.
More on how this played out going from 0 to Series D in a future post.