when the work is people

there was a period where i was managing a team of three and still trying to do the design work myself. i told myself it was because the projects were important. but mostly i think i didn’t know what i was supposed to be doing instead.

the shift from designer to design leader is usually described as a career milestone. what nobody tells you is that it involves losing the thing that told you whether you were any good. when i was designing, the feedback loop was tight. you made something, you tested it, you learned something. the work was discrete and the signals were clear.

managing people doesn’t have that. you have a conversation. you shift how someone thinks about a problem. two weeks later they make a better decision than they would have otherwise. your contribution is almost impossible to locate. and in the meantime you’ve got four other conversations happening and none of them have clean signals either.

i kept trying to find the equivalent of the tight feedback loop. kept looking for the thing that would tell me i was doing it right. i’d get involved in work i should have handed off, not because i didn’t trust the person but because involvement felt like evidence of contribution.

it wasn’t.

what actually helped was reframing what the output was. when i was a designer, the output was the work. when i started leading a team, the output was the thinking — other people’s thinking, shaped by mine. a workshop that changed how the team approached a problem. a difficult conversation that unlocked something. a review that sent work in a better direction. none of it shows up in your portfolio. all of it shows up in the quality of what the team ships.

the job is mostly synthesis now. sitting in a room full of competing perspectives and finding the shape that moves things forward. making sense of messy inputs — team dynamics, stakeholder pressure, half-formed ideas, research that nobody’s quite sure what to do with — and turning them into something the team can actually work from.

it took me too long to see that as design. but it is. it’s just design at a different level of abstraction.

if you’re sitting on research or stakeholder input that doesn’t have a clear shape yet, i offer research synthesis — turning messy evidence into a position you can actually act on. $300.