When I became a design director, I thought I needed to be the best designer in the room.
Wrong.
The skills that made me a good senior designer—craft, detail, intuition—mattered less. A different set determined success.
The Skills That Matter
1. Organizational navigation. Who decides? Who influences? Who blocks? How do budgets flow? The org chart tells you almost nothing. Figure out the real power structure.
2. Stakeholder translation. The same decision gets explained differently to Engineering (trade-offs), PMs (scope), Executives (risk). Learn to translate.
3. Priority ruthlessness. There's always more problems than resources. The skill is choosing what NOT to do—and defending that choice.
4. Feedback calibration. As a senior designer, you fix the work. As a director, you help people find the fix themselves. Teaching, not doing.
5. Upward communication. Your leaders don't have time for nuance. Headlines: What do I need to know? What do I need to do? What's the risk?
6. Vision without ego. Set direction that others can execute and make their own. If only you can execute your vision, it's a bottleneck, not leadership.
7. Calm under ambiguity. Director problems rarely have clear answers. Teams mirror their leader's energy. Panic cascades. Calm does too.
What Matters Less
Raw design ability.
You need enough craft to evaluate work and earn credibility. But the senior designers on your team should be better craftspeople than you. That's the point.
Directors who can't let go of craft become bottlenecks. Every decision routes through them. The team stops growing.
The Trap
You got promoted because you were a great designer. Now you need to be a great enabler of design.
Different skills. Some people make this transition easily. Others struggle. There's no shame in deciding the director path isn't for you—IC leadership roles exist for a reason.
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