Why great design managers are usually great designers first

The design industry has a backwards promotion problem. We rush people into management before they’ve mastered the craft they’re supposed to lead. The result? A layer of managers who sound smart in meetings but couldn’t debug a component system if their budget depended on it.

I was listening to Mig Reyes on the Dive Club Podcast recently, and he cut straight to it: you shouldn’t go into design management until you’ve really excelled as an individual contributor. That might sound obvious, but look around. How many design managers do you know who got promoted because they were “ready for the next step” rather than because they’d gone impossibly deep on the work itself?

I’ve worked under creative directors who hadn’t touched a design file in years. Smart people, sure. They could talk strategy and stakeholder management all day. But ask them to show a junior designer how to set up a proper grid system or optimize a component for accessibility? Suddenly they’re very busy with “strategic initiatives.” They’d delegate it or, worse, wave it off as “execution details.”

Here’s the thing: sometimes the best way to unblock someone isn’t a pep talk. It’s sitting down and showing them exactly how to solve the problem in Figma. But you can’t do that if you’ve been living in PowerPoint for the past three years.

Think about the best football coaches—Guardiola, Zidane, Xabi Alonso. They weren’t just players; they were obsessive students of the game. When they became coaches, they didn’t abandon that obsession. They brought it with them. They could see what their players couldn’t see because they’d been there, in the weeds, figuring it out.

The same logic applies to design management. Your team can smell it when you’re faking fluency. They don’t need you to be the best designer in the room, but they need to know you understand their world. That you’ve wrestled with the same constraints, felt the same frustrations, celebrated the same small victories.

Step into management too early and you’re missing half the vocabulary. You can’t give advice on problems you’ve never solved. You can’t predict the second-order effects of decisions you’ve never had to live with. Your team will figure this out faster than you think.

I’m drawn to the people side of management—the conversations, the pattern recognition, helping someone level up their thinking. But I never want to be the kind of leader who can’t open the file. Staying close to the work keeps me honest. It reminds me that design isn’t something I used to do. It’s something I still care about getting right.

If you’re thinking about moving into design management, don’t ask “Am I ready to lead?” Ask: “Can I still solve the problems I’m asking others to solve?”

If the answer is no, maybe spend another year or two in the trenches. Your future team will thank you for it.