The untold job description of design leaders (and why you still do it)

There was the job description you signed up for. And then there's the one you've actually been living.

Imagine it printed on an old, crumpled page, scribbled over with red ink, as if every passing month someone decided to add just one more thing.

The real responsibilities that no one told you about.

Title: Design Leader

Subtitle: Keep the lights on. Hold the line. Inspire when you're exhausted.

• Requirements: Ability to take a vision and translate it to a dozen people who each hear it differently. Ability to remain calm when that vision gets shredded by opinions that feel like they’re coming from every corner of the room. Ability to carry not just a project, but the hopes, fears, and insecurities of every designer on your team.
• Desired skills: Psychic capabilities to predict which design decision will get pulled apart next. Talent for translating human needs into business language, business language back into human needs, all without losing your sanity.
• Daily responsibilities: Stand in the middle between creativity and constraint, advocating for the value of good design, even when the room is only half listening. Care so deeply it keeps you awake at night, yet learn to detach when decisions are made that don't honour that care. Be the buffer between your team and the blunt force of deadlines, stakeholder pressure, and shifting priorities.
• Perks: Rare moments of magic. Those times when everything aligns, when your team builds something and it’s not just good, it’s phenomenal. The rush of seeing your designers grow, watching them go from timid voices in meetings to fearless advocates for their own work. That sense of knowing you’ve not just led, but protected. That’s it. That’s the perk. You get to protect the magic when no one else will.

End of day reflection

Nobody prepared you for this version of the job. The one where you're both a cheerleader and a protector, a translator, a negotiator, a keeper of everyone’s dreams. You hold up the wall, so your team can paint it. You take the hits, so they don’t have to. You light the fire, so they remember why they’re here.

And then it’s just you, alone at the end of the day, walking to your car, bag slung over your shoulder. The world feels heavy and full of question marks. Why do you keep doing this?

Because for every meeting that drains you, every compromise that bruises, there’s a reason. A moment when you watch someone on your team find their voice. A project that finds its way through the chaos and genuinely makes things better. A whisper in the back of your mind that says, This matters.

It's tough, and far from glamorous. But here you are, still showing up, still caring. You’re in the middle of it all, and that’s exactly where you need to be.

So here’s the real job description: Be the spark. Keep the hope alive, even when it's hard.

And to every design leader out there who keeps rewriting the invisible job description, who adds a little note to it every single day: You're doing the work that no one sees but everyone feels.

What would your version of the real job description say?