the credit problem

the longer you lead a team, the harder it gets to answer the question “who designed this?”

and it’s not an abstract question. it comes up in portfolio reviews, in promotion cases, in the moment someone asks you what you’ve worked on recently and you have to decide how to describe work that was genuinely made by five people.

the version of this i’ve found most honest: i don’t fully know what my contribution is anymore. not because i’ve lost track, but because the line between directing work and doing it has become genuinely unclear.

i had a thought in a workshop. a designer on my team built it into something. i gave feedback on three iterations. they pushed back on one of my notes and they were right. the final thing is better because of that push-back. what did i contribute? the question, the framing, the first three rounds of pressure, and then getting out of the way. was that design work? i think so. but i can’t put it in a case study with a clean story about decisions i made.

there’s a version of this that leads to credit inflation — where the leader takes too much, describes collaborative work as if it were solo, uses the pronoun “i” for everything the team produced. it happens constantly. it’s not always malicious. it’s just the path of least resistance when you need a portfolio entry.

the other version is credit deflation — where the leader gives too much away, can’t take ownership of anything because it all had collaborators, and ends up with a portfolio that reads like they were in a lot of rooms but didn’t make anything.

i’ve done both. neither accurately represents the work.

what i’ve started to believe is that the useful unit of credit isn’t the artefact. it’s the decision.

i can’t claim “i designed that product” in the same way i could when i worked alone. but i can say: i recognised that we were solving the wrong problem and redirected the team before we shipped something that wouldn’t land. i can say: i structured the critique that got the work unstuck in week four. i can say: i made the call to cut the feature that three stakeholders wanted because it was going to undermine the core behaviour.

none of those show up in a handoff file. but they’re the work. and describing them specifically — not “i led the team” but the actual decisions with the actual stakes — is closer to honest than anything else i’ve tried.

it doesn’t fully resolve the problem. portfolios still want outputs you can point to. the people reviewing you want to see what you made, not just describe how you thought. i haven’t found a perfect answer to that.

but i’ve stopped trying to simplify the credit question into something clean. the work was collaborative. that makes the story harder to tell. that’s not something to smooth over — it’s something to describe accurately, if you can.

if you’re trying to make sense of a body of work that had too many hands in it to trace cleanly — for a case study, a promotion case, a portfolio you’re not sure how to frame — i offer synthesis. i’ll help you find the actual through-line. $300.