Measure Your Leadership Beyond What
Your Team Ships
Y'all in for a long one? Today's post deserved all of my thoughts no matter how I tried to shorten it.
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Your team launched the feature. The screens look great. Engineering built it beautifully. Stakeholders are happy, and someone has already turned the project into a celebratory slide with confetti graphics.
Excellent. But did your team succeed because of your leadership—or survive despite it?
A polished launch tells you what reached production. It doesn’t tell you how many late nights it required, whether the team understood why they were building it, or if one exhausted senior designer quietly prevented the whole thing from catching fire.
Design leaders need to care about what ships. We also need to measure what the work leaves behind.
Delivery is a result, not the whole story. Shipping matters. Products have to make it out of Figma eventually, no matter how emotionally attached we’ve become to the prototype.
But delivery can hide a surprising amount of dysfunction.
A team can hit every deadline while operating on unclear priorities, constant interruptions, and heroic individual effort. From the outside, everything appears successful. Inside the team, people are performing 9 to 5 without the catchy Dolly Parton soundtrack—or, more importantly, the nine-to-five part.
If the same people repeatedly save every project, your process isn’t strong. You have a few highly responsible humans absorbing its weaknesses.
Leadership means looking beyond whether the work got done and asking how it got done.
Was the direction clear? Were decisions made at the right time? Did people have enough information to work independently? Could the team deliver this way again without sacrificing quality or sanity?
Sustainable success should be repeatable. Heroics rarely are.
Look at the decisions your team can make without you.
One of the strongest signs of leadership is what happens when you’re not in the meeting.
Can designers explain the problem they’re solving? Can they evaluate tradeoffs without waiting for your opinion? Do they know when to move forward and when to raise a concern?
If every meaningful decision requires your approval, you may feel very important. You are also the bottleneck wearing a respectable blazer.
Your job is to help the team develop judgment, not rent yours by the hour.
That requires more than telling people to “take ownership.” Give them access to the context behind decisions. Clarify what they own, where they have flexibility, and which choices need broader alignment.
Then let them make the call.
You may not agree with every detail. The question is whether the reasoning is sound and the outcome meets the quality bar—not whether they produced the exact solution hiding in your head.
Measure clarity before velocity.
Teams move faster when they know where they’re going.
Before blaming slow delivery on capacity, look at how much time disappears into unclear requests, repeated reviews, and priorities that change depending on who last spoke to the executive team.
A healthy team should be able to answer:
If those answers keep changing, the problem isn’t that your designers need to move faster. They’re trying to hit a target being carried through the parking lot.
Good leadership reduces preventable confusion. It creates enough alignment for the team to spend its energy solving the problem instead of repeatedly discovering what the problem is.
That may not produce a dramatic artifact for your quarterly review. It will produce better work with significantly less interpretive dance.
Pay attention to what your team is learning.
A strong team shouldn’t merely produce more over time. Its people should become more capable.
Are designers taking on increasingly complex problems? Is someone who once struggled to present their work now leading a difficult stakeholder conversation? Are junior team members getting thoughtful opportunities instead of an endless supply of low-risk cleanup tasks?
Growth requires deliberate attention.
In one-on-ones, talk about more than project status. Identify the skills each person is developing and give them work that lets them practice. Offer feedback specific enough to use. “Be more strategic” is not development advice. It’s a fortune cookie with access to performance reviews.
Try: “You explained the design clearly, but the conversation stayed focused on the interface. Next time, connect your recommendation to the support problem we’re trying to reduce.”
Now the designer knows what to practice. Your leadership shows up in the team’s expanding range—not just the volume of work leaving the building.
Notice whether collaboration is getting easier.
Design rarely succeeds alone.
Your team needs productive relationships with product, engineering, research, support, sales, and anyone else who has useful context or the ability to derail a review at the last possible moment.
Look at how those relationships function.
Are designers brought in early enough to shape the problem, or asked to decorate a decision that has already been made? Can engineers raise constraints without the conversation becoming territorial? Do product managers understand what information design needs to begin?
Strong collaboration doesn’t mean everyone agrees. It means disagreement produces clearer tradeoffs instead of three follow-up meetings and a mysterious sense of resentment.
A good design leader improves the conditions around the team. Sometimes that means clarifying roles. Sometimes it means repairing trust. Sometimes it means explaining, for the seventh time, that research is not a ceremonial activity performed after the roadmap has been finalized.
The work gets better when the relationships supporting it get better.
Watch who gets heard.
A team can appear collaborative while two confident people make every decision.
Pay attention to whose ideas shape the work, who gets interrupted, and who only shares concerns privately after the meeting.
Leadership isn’t about forcing everyone to speak equally in every conversation. Some people think best out loud; others need time to process. Give your team more than one way to contribute—written feedback, smaller discussions, structured critiques, or time to review materials beforehand.
Then notice whether input actually influences decisions. Inviting someone to the meeting is not the same as giving their expertise weight. Your strongest idea may come from the person least interested in wrestling for airtime. Build a process that doesn’t confuse volume with value.
Include team health in the definition of success.
You don’t need to turn every one-on-one into a wellness seminar. You do need to know whether the way your team works is costing people more than it should.
Look for patterns: work repeatedly spilling into evenings, difficulty taking time off, constant priority switching, or a team that has stopped raising concerns because nothing changes when they do.
Ask better questions.
Instead of “Are you doing okay?” try:
Then act on what you hear. Burnout surveys followed by no meaningful change are simply documentation.
Build a better leadership scorecard.
Your scorecard can include delivery and business outcomes. It should. But add signals that tell you what kind of team is producing those results.
Look at whether:
Not all of this fits neatly into a dashboard. That doesn’t make it unimportant.
Use a mix of project retrospectives, one-on-one patterns, partner feedback, delivery data, and examples of individual growth. Look for trends rather than treating one difficult week as a leadership emergency.
Measure what continues after the launch.
The best evidence of your leadership isn’t that your team can deliver when you’re closely directing every move. It’s that people understand the mission, exercise good judgment, learn from the work, and make one another better.
Of course, celebrate what ships. Share the outcome. Add the confetti graphic if you must. Then look beyond the launch. Ask whether the team is clearer, stronger, and more capable than it was before the project began.
That’s the work your leadership shipped.
---
Your team launched the feature. The screens look great. Engineering built it beautifully. Stakeholders are happy, and someone has already turned the project into a celebratory slide with confetti graphics.
Excellent. But did your team succeed because of your leadership—or survive despite it?
A polished launch tells you what reached production. It doesn’t tell you how many late nights it required, whether the team understood why they were building it, or if one exhausted senior designer quietly prevented the whole thing from catching fire.
Design leaders need to care about what ships. We also need to measure what the work leaves behind.
Delivery is a result, not the whole story. Shipping matters. Products have to make it out of Figma eventually, no matter how emotionally attached we’ve become to the prototype.
But delivery can hide a surprising amount of dysfunction.
A team can hit every deadline while operating on unclear priorities, constant interruptions, and heroic individual effort. From the outside, everything appears successful. Inside the team, people are performing 9 to 5 without the catchy Dolly Parton soundtrack—or, more importantly, the nine-to-five part.
If the same people repeatedly save every project, your process isn’t strong. You have a few highly responsible humans absorbing its weaknesses.
Leadership means looking beyond whether the work got done and asking how it got done.
Was the direction clear? Were decisions made at the right time? Did people have enough information to work independently? Could the team deliver this way again without sacrificing quality or sanity?
Sustainable success should be repeatable. Heroics rarely are.
Look at the decisions your team can make without you.
One of the strongest signs of leadership is what happens when you’re not in the meeting.
Can designers explain the problem they’re solving? Can they evaluate tradeoffs without waiting for your opinion? Do they know when to move forward and when to raise a concern?
If every meaningful decision requires your approval, you may feel very important. You are also the bottleneck wearing a respectable blazer.
Your job is to help the team develop judgment, not rent yours by the hour.
That requires more than telling people to “take ownership.” Give them access to the context behind decisions. Clarify what they own, where they have flexibility, and which choices need broader alignment.
Then let them make the call.
You may not agree with every detail. The question is whether the reasoning is sound and the outcome meets the quality bar—not whether they produced the exact solution hiding in your head.
Measure clarity before velocity.
Teams move faster when they know where they’re going.
Before blaming slow delivery on capacity, look at how much time disappears into unclear requests, repeated reviews, and priorities that change depending on who last spoke to the executive team.
A healthy team should be able to answer:
- What problem are we solving?
- Why does it matter now?
- Who are we solving it for?
- What does success look like?
- Who makes the final decision?
If those answers keep changing, the problem isn’t that your designers need to move faster. They’re trying to hit a target being carried through the parking lot.
Good leadership reduces preventable confusion. It creates enough alignment for the team to spend its energy solving the problem instead of repeatedly discovering what the problem is.
That may not produce a dramatic artifact for your quarterly review. It will produce better work with significantly less interpretive dance.
Pay attention to what your team is learning.
A strong team shouldn’t merely produce more over time. Its people should become more capable.
Are designers taking on increasingly complex problems? Is someone who once struggled to present their work now leading a difficult stakeholder conversation? Are junior team members getting thoughtful opportunities instead of an endless supply of low-risk cleanup tasks?
Growth requires deliberate attention.
In one-on-ones, talk about more than project status. Identify the skills each person is developing and give them work that lets them practice. Offer feedback specific enough to use. “Be more strategic” is not development advice. It’s a fortune cookie with access to performance reviews.
Try: “You explained the design clearly, but the conversation stayed focused on the interface. Next time, connect your recommendation to the support problem we’re trying to reduce.”
Now the designer knows what to practice. Your leadership shows up in the team’s expanding range—not just the volume of work leaving the building.
Notice whether collaboration is getting easier.
Design rarely succeeds alone.
Your team needs productive relationships with product, engineering, research, support, sales, and anyone else who has useful context or the ability to derail a review at the last possible moment.
Look at how those relationships function.
Are designers brought in early enough to shape the problem, or asked to decorate a decision that has already been made? Can engineers raise constraints without the conversation becoming territorial? Do product managers understand what information design needs to begin?
Strong collaboration doesn’t mean everyone agrees. It means disagreement produces clearer tradeoffs instead of three follow-up meetings and a mysterious sense of resentment.
A good design leader improves the conditions around the team. Sometimes that means clarifying roles. Sometimes it means repairing trust. Sometimes it means explaining, for the seventh time, that research is not a ceremonial activity performed after the roadmap has been finalized.
The work gets better when the relationships supporting it get better.
Watch who gets heard.
A team can appear collaborative while two confident people make every decision.
Pay attention to whose ideas shape the work, who gets interrupted, and who only shares concerns privately after the meeting.
Leadership isn’t about forcing everyone to speak equally in every conversation. Some people think best out loud; others need time to process. Give your team more than one way to contribute—written feedback, smaller discussions, structured critiques, or time to review materials beforehand.
Then notice whether input actually influences decisions. Inviting someone to the meeting is not the same as giving their expertise weight. Your strongest idea may come from the person least interested in wrestling for airtime. Build a process that doesn’t confuse volume with value.
Include team health in the definition of success.
You don’t need to turn every one-on-one into a wellness seminar. You do need to know whether the way your team works is costing people more than it should.
Look for patterns: work repeatedly spilling into evenings, difficulty taking time off, constant priority switching, or a team that has stopped raising concerns because nothing changes when they do.
Ask better questions.
Instead of “Are you doing okay?” try:
- What’s taking more effort than it should?
- What are you having to skip to keep up?
- Where are you unclear about expectations?
- What would make this work more sustainable?
Then act on what you hear. Burnout surveys followed by no meaningful change are simply documentation.
Build a better leadership scorecard.
Your scorecard can include delivery and business outcomes. It should. But add signals that tell you what kind of team is producing those results.
Look at whether:
- Designers can make sound decisions with increasing independence.
- Priorities and ownership are clear.
- Quality holds up without relying on last-minute rescues.
- People are developing skills and taking on greater responsibility.
- Cross-functional partners involve design at the right moments.
- The team can disagree productively and recover from mistakes.
- Strong performance is sustainable instead of quietly subsidized by personal time.
Not all of this fits neatly into a dashboard. That doesn’t make it unimportant.
Use a mix of project retrospectives, one-on-one patterns, partner feedback, delivery data, and examples of individual growth. Look for trends rather than treating one difficult week as a leadership emergency.
Measure what continues after the launch.
The best evidence of your leadership isn’t that your team can deliver when you’re closely directing every move. It’s that people understand the mission, exercise good judgment, learn from the work, and make one another better.
Of course, celebrate what ships. Share the outcome. Add the confetti graphic if you must. Then look beyond the launch. Ask whether the team is clearer, stronger, and more capable than it was before the project began.
That’s the work your leadership shipped.
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