Taste matters. Vision matters. Any experienced design leader knows this instinctively.
The best design leaders I’ve worked with all had taste: a sharp eye, a point of view, an instinct for what good looks and feels like. It is one of the things that earns them trust and respect from their teams.
But here is the thing they do not tell you in design school. Taste and vision alone do not scale.
If your team’s success depends on you reviewing every screen, art-directing every flow, personally approving every font choice, you are not leading a team. You are managing a bottleneck.
Leadership is about building the conditions for quality to happen without you in the room. It means turning taste into culture, vision into shared understanding, intuition into repeatable practice.
Without that structure, leadership becomes gatekeeping. You end up chasing consistency through sheer effort. And you burn out trying.
Taste is where it starts, not where it ends
“Design is the rendering of intent.” – Jared Spool
Vision gives a team direction. Taste gives a team standards. You need both. Desperately.
Without vision, teams drift. Without taste, teams fragment.
But vision and taste left unstructured? They become brittle. They depend on your personal presence. And they do not scale, no matter how talented you are.
Implicit knowledge is not a leadership strategy. Systems thinking is what makes the difference.
Systems capture tacit taste. They encode decision logic. They enable the team to act independently, and to act well.
They also create the conditions where creative momentum can thrive. Momentum that is not reliant on you being present at every touchpoint.
Why designers resist systems — and why they should not
“Design systems are not a project. They are a product serving other products.” – Nathan Curtis, EightShapes
Many designers resist the idea of systems. It is easy to see why. They worry systems will make everything feel mechanical, predictable, lifeless.
And I get it. We have all seen clumsy systems. Ones that force everything into rigid patterns and suck the life out of the work.
But great systems do not do that. They create headroom.
When everything is up for grabs all the time, teams waste creative energy debating minutiae, the stuff that should already be decided.
A system gives designers clarity about what matters and what does not. Where consistency is non-negotiable, and where they are free to explore.
If you have read Atomic Design by Brad Frost, or Org Design for Design Orgs by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner, this is exactly the principle. Systems are there to enable creativity, not to replace it.
And that is why great creative leaders embrace them. Not to suppress creativity, but to make it possible at scale.
What systems thinking looks like in design leadership
Systems thinking is not about components. It is about how decisions get made, and how judgement gets distributed across the team.
Here are just a few systems great design leaders build:
- Component systems — how interaction principles are applied consistently across the product.
- Feedback systems — structured critique processes that teach people how to evaluate work, not just react to it.
- Decision systems — clarity about who decides what, when, and why.
- Hiring and onboarding systems — ways to consistently bring in and level up new designers, so culture and quality do not depend on any one person.
- Principle systems — codifying the non-obvious values that drive your team’s aesthetic and functional judgement.
None of this is about policing taste. It is about scaling it.
The cost of not thinking in systems
When leaders try to scale taste without systems, you see the same symptoms every time.
Endless feedback loops and rework. Designers waiting for leadership to approve every decision. Inconsistency across products and touchpoints. Burned out leaders who feel trapped by their own success. Juniors unable to build their own judgement, because the standards are not explicit.
It is exhausting. It is unsustainable. And it is completely avoidable.
Building your systems thinking muscle
Building systems thinking is not hard. But it does take discipline.
Here is where I often suggest teams start.
Document decisions
If you are giving feedback on the same issue more than twice, it needs to be written down as a principle.
Teach frameworks, not answers
Instead of “move that element”, say “here is how we structure hierarchy on this screen type.”
Make taste visible
Talk about what good looks like and why. Show examples. Explain the patterns behind the patterns.
Build cultural scaffolding
Use critique rituals, team language, shared references. This is where systems become lived, not just documented.
Be okay with imperfection
Systems evolve. You are better off starting with a rough system than waiting for the perfect one.
Keep systems alive
Review them. Update them. Involve the team. A dead system quickly becomes a constraint, not an enabler.
Systems make taste more powerful
“Organizations that rely solely on craft scale poorly. We must instead scale design through organizational systems.” – Peter Merholz, Org Design for Design Orgs
Here is the payoff. When systems are in place, your taste as a leader gets applied where it matters most.
You are no longer the font police. You are shaping story, experience, emotional tone.
Systems free you to focus on high-leverage creative moves, not micromanaging the details.
And when the team internalises systems thinking, they start making better decisions on their own.
That is where creative momentum comes from. Not because leadership lets go of quality, but because the team owns it.
Final thoughts
Design leadership absolutely starts with taste. But it scales through systems.
If you want your team to grow, if you want quality to be consistent, if you want to stop being the bottleneck, build the systems that let your vision thrive without you.
Taste matters. Vision matters. But without systems, they will burn you out.
With systems, they will light the way.
And they will make you a better leader in the process.
