Leading design inside high-growth environments means orchestrating signals across product, engineering, and operations. Systems thinking empowers design leaders to model those relationships explicitly.
Mapping Three Core Layers
I tend to map three core layers:
- Wisdom: the guiding principles, values, and narratives that anchor how we make decisions.
- Workflow: the rituals, cadences, and source-of-truth artifacts we use to ship consistently.
- Work: the tangible pursuits—experiments, features, and fixes—that move the needle.
When these layers align, we can zoom in or out with confidence. We make trade-offs visible. We build better feedback loops. And we shape organizations that are adaptable by default.