Design Leaders Must Prioritize Time with Customers

Design leaders: If you haven’t talked to a user in the past two weeks, you’re cooked.

As design leaders assume more responsibility, one thing often falls through the cracks: direct connection with the user.

It’s understandable. Your calendar is packed. You’re thinking about hiring, team morale, headcount plans, design systems, research roadmaps, cross-functional alignment, showing impact—the list never ends.

But here’s the truth: If you’re not deeply connected to the user’s challenges, none of it matters.

Most design leaders think the job is running a design team. It’s not. Your job is staying obsessed with user problems.

You were put in this position to solve problems. Real ones. You were probably promoted into your position because you’re really good at solving user problems. But if you drift too far from those problems, you risk leading a team that is active but ineffective—busy, but not impactful.

Success Tracks Directly to Time with Users

Want clarity on what matters? Want to empower your team to focus? Want to show meaningful business impact?

Spend more time with users.

It’s that simple. Staying close to their frustrations, goals, and realities gives you the clearest line of sight into what your team should build—and why. It’s how you avoid chasing vanity projects and start delivering real value.

If your team is always shipping but it’s hard to articulate the impact, chances are you’re solving problems that don’t matter. And the fix? Time with users.

How to Stay Close to Users (Even When You’re Busy)

Here are practical ways to build a consistent user connection into your leadership routine:

💬 Executive Sponsorships

If your company assigns executive sponsors to major accounts, ensure you’re included in the rotation. These relationships offer a high-fidelity line to customer needs, especially for strategic, high-value users. If your org doesn’t do this yet, advocate for it—it’s a game-changer.

🧠 Sit in on Discovery Research

Not just validation. Discovery. You want raw, unfiltered user pain. Shadow your research team on calls or listen to recordings. Ask to be looped in on early-stage work where users talk about goals, frustrations, and context, not just how they’re responding to a prototype.

🆘 Listen to Support Calls

Customer support is a goldmine of insight. Join live support sessions or watch call recordings. You’ll hear the real pain points in users’ own words—and start to notice repeat patterns fast.

🎧 Join the Support Rotation

If your company allows it, work a shift. Triage tickets. Answer chats. Escalate bugs. It’s humbling—and enlightening. You’ll quickly see the delta between what you thought users struggled with and what they experience every day.

💼 Sit In on Sales Demos

Sales calls give you the unvarnished first impression. What makes people lean in? Where do they get confused? What promises are being made? You’ll understand how your product lands with new users and how your brand story is being told.

📹 Watch User Call Recordings (But Don’t Stop There)

This is the easiest path—but the least rich. Recordings are helpful, but they lack nuance and depth. You can’t probe or dig deeper. Use them as a supplement, not a substitute.

🔑 Tip: Not sure where to begin? Talk to your heads of Research and Customer Support/Success. They can plug you in right away.

So… How Much Time Should You Spend?

Let’s look at the math.

One 30-minute user call per week? That’s 1.25% of your workweek. That’s not enough. Your calendar reflects your values—whether you like it or not.

Years ago, John Chambers (former Cisco CEO) said something that stuck with me:

“Show me your calendar, and I’ll show you what you value.”

He’s right.

If understanding user needs is at the core of your team’s success (and it is), then you need to block meaningful time for it.

I recommend aiming for 20% of your time.

That’s about 8 hours a week, spent actively listening to and learning from your users.

Is that a lot? Sure. But so is the cost of working on the wrong things.

Final Thought

Being a design leader means you’re no longer just shaping pixels—you’re shaping what gets prioritized, why it matters, and how your team makes an impact.

And the only way to do that well… is to stay close to the people you’re building for.

Becoming a great leader…

What kind of leader are you?

Most of us don’t stumble into great leadership. It’s not magic, instinct, or pure charisma. It’s something we shape over time—through mistakes, reflection, and a lot of deliberate effort.

One thing that has worked well for me is defining a clear set of principles for the kind of leader I aspire to be, paired with a leadership style that reflects how I want to run teams on a day-to-day basis. It’s given me a north star to return to when things get chaotic, and a personal accountability framework for how I show up.

Have you done this? What would yours look like? How often do you revisit it?

Here are mine—for inspiration or critique:

My Leadership Principles

(Based on Forbes’ Five Basic Principles of Highly Effective Leadership)

Shared vision — A leader’s role is to communicate a vision that aligns and inspires the team and ensures everyone understands and is committed.

Positive culture — Great leaders create a culture of trust, high morale, diversity of thought, and minimal drama. When a leader can create a strong and positive culture, retention is easy. It becomes a place where people want to stay and grow.

Open communication — Clear, open communication is essential. Strong leaders set the tone by providing honest and regular feedback, and they expect the same in return.

People-focused, customer-centric — Leadership is about empowering teams with clarity, confidence, and connection. By helping others grow and succeed, we foster loyalty, drive impact, and create better experiences for customers. Happy teams lead to happy customers. Happy customers lead to a happy balance sheet.

My Leadership Style

Elevate…

• Elevate the Craft — Delivering our best work requires time to sharpen our skills. We must prioritize growth and continuous improvement.

• Elevate the Team — We’re not a family—we choose to be here. Our role is to create an environment where everyone thrives. I’m here to coach and guide, not dictate.

• Elevate the Results — Intuitive design isn’t accidental. We must highlight the effort behind the scenes and consistently demonstrate the ROI of our work.

Empower — Everyone is empowered to own their work from end to end. You are accountable for both successes and failures (and learnings are very different from failures).

Trust — Micromanagement has no place here. We must trust each other to deliver the value we were hired for, creating space for autonomy and innovation.

If you haven’t done this exercise before, I challenge you to take a stab at it. You can build on frameworks you admire (like I did), or create something unique. The goal isn’t to be perfect—it’s to be intentional.

You might be surprised by what comes out when you ask yourself, “What kind of leader do I want to be—and what kind of team do I want to lead?”

That’s where it starts.

Design is now about curation

With AI, design is becoming less about creation—and more about curation.

The tools can generate layouts, suggest flows, write copy, even anticipate user behaviors. But they can’t yet understand nuance. They can’t empathize. They can’t sit with the friction of a user’s experience and ask, “Why does this feel off?”

That’s where the designer comes in.

Great design today isn’t about drawing rectangles or reinventing the UI wheel. It’s about deeply understanding user needs, goals, and workflows—and then curating the right experience to meet them. It’s about removing the unnecessary, sanding down the edges, and guiding the AI’s output into something cohesive, intentional, and usable.

AI might build the pieces. But we still define the puzzle.

Designers are no longer just creators.

Designers are curators.

AI In Your Product: Magic or Transparency

Yes, AI is pretty nifty. But when integrating AI into your product, you have two paths:

One—seamlessly integrate AI into the product, making it feel like magic for the user. The product is smarter, which makes the user feel smarter. Until it isn't. Sometimes, AI things go wonky (technical term, I'm sure), leaving your users frustrated and blaming your product.

Or two—call out that it's powered by AI. However, this could prevent users from trusting your product or make them opt out of using that feature or product altogether.

Which path do you choose? When and why?

The answer, of course, depends on the experience you're designing—and your users' tolerance for unpredictability.

If your AI feature is additive—something that enhances but doesn't make or break the core workflow—magic might be the way to go. Think auto-tagging content, generating a first draft, or suggesting an action. The risk is low, the payoff is high, and when it works, it feels delightful. When it doesn't, users can easily course-correct.

But if the AI is critical to success—driving decisions, surfacing key insights, or replacing a human task—it might be better to show your work. Users want to understand what's happening under the hood. They want transparency, clarity, and sometimes even a little control. Acknowledge the AI, set expectations, and design affordances that allow users to review, edit, or override as needed.

There's also a third path: contextual transparency. You don't need a flashing "AI did this" badge on every screen—but you can signal it thoughtfully. A well-placed tooltip, a short explainer on first use, or subtle visual cues that communicate what's automated versus manual. Transparency without fear. Trust without overwhelm.

Ultimately, it comes down to trust, clarity, and control. Not just what the AI does—but how you help the user understand what just happened, what they can do about it, and whether they feel empowered or undermined by the experience.

Because the real magic isn't that AI is in your product. It's when your user still feels in charge—even when they're not.

Why Most Design Hiring Fails (and How to Fix It)

Hiring great designers is one of the hardest challenges in UX leadership. On paper, a candidate might check all the boxes—solid portfolio, impressive resume, glowing references—but once they’re in the seat, things don’t always work out. Why? Because most design hiring processes are broken in ways that set both the company and the candidate up for failure.

Here’s what’s going wrong—and how to fix it.

1. Prioritizing Portfolios Over Thinking

A stunning portfolio is great, but it doesn’t tell you how a designer thinks. Too many hiring teams over-index on polished visuals without understanding the problem-solving process behind the work.

Fix: Prioritize case studies that show a candidate’s reasoning, constraints, trade-offs, and impact. In interviews, have them walk through a past project and focus on why they made certain choices—not just what they made.

2. Ignoring Team Fit and Collaboration

A designer doesn’t work in a vacuum. If they can’t collaborate effectively with PMs, engineers, researchers, and stakeholders, their work won’t drive impact—no matter how good they are individually.

Fix: Assess collaboration and communication skills. Ask about past experiences working cross-functionally. Consider a time-boxed working session where they solve a problem with your team to see their real-world approach. This does not mean give them a take-home assignment.

3. Overvaluing “Culture Fit” (and Under-Valuing “Culture Add”)

Many hiring managers unconsciously look for designers who feel familiar—people who match the existing team’s style, background, or personality. This leads to homogeneity and missed opportunities to strengthen the team’s perspective.

Fix: Instead of “culture fit,” assess what a candidate adds to the team. Do they bring a different way of thinking? A new skill set? A perspective your team lacks? These are strengths, not risks.

4. Testing for the Wrong Skills

Whiteboard challenges and design exercises can be useful—but only if they reflect the actual work the designer will be doing. Too often, hiring processes rely on hypothetical exercises that reward speed and confidence over depth and critical thinking.

Fix: Design exercises should be relevant to the role. If the job involves deep systems thinking, test for that. If it’s about rapid iteration, structure the challenge accordingly. Avoid unnecessary stress tests that don’t map to real work.

5. Lack of Clear Expectations for the Role

If you ask five different people on the hiring panel what they’re looking for in a designer, you’ll often get five different answers. Without alignment, you end up with an inconsistent and unclear hiring process.

Fix: Define success before you start hiring. What problems will this designer be expected to solve? What skills matter most? What will they be measured on? Get clear internally before assessing candidates. Each interviewer should be assessing specific skills of the candidate.

6. Not Selling the Role and Team

Great designers have options. If your interview process is all about evaluating them but not showing them why your team is a great place to work, they’ll go elsewhere.

Fix: Hiring is a two-way street. Be intentional about showing what makes your team unique, the kind of work they’ll be doing, and the impact they can have. Make sure they leave excited about the opportunity.

7. Relying Too Much on Gut Feel

Hiring based on “I have a good feeling about this person” is a fast track to bias-driven hiring mistakes. Your gut might be useful, but it shouldn’t be the primary decision-making factor.

Fix: Use structured interviews with defined criteria. Make sure every interviewer evaluates candidates against the same key skills and qualities. Balance intuition with evidence.

8. Failing to Provide a Good Candidate Experience

A messy or disorganized hiring process can drive away top talent. Long delays, unclear expectations, or lack of feedback all create a negative impression—and the best candidates won’t wait around.

Fix: Make sure your hiring process is well-structured, timely, and respectful of candidates’ time. Even if they’re not the right fit, leave them with a positive experience of your company.

9. Neglecting Onboarding and Growth

Hiring a designer is just the beginning. If they’re left to sink or swim with no support, they won’t reach their full potential—or worse, they’ll leave.

Fix: Have a clear onboarding plan that sets them up for success. Assign mentors, set early goals, and provide growth opportunities. Great designers stay where they feel supported and challenged.

Final Thoughts

Hiring the right designers isn’t about luck—it’s about having a process that identifies not just great designers, but the right designers for your team. You design team makeup should reflect your user base to ensure the types of solutions delivered are the types of solutions needed. By focusing on problem-solving, collaboration, structured evaluation, and a great candidate experience, you’ll build a stronger, more effective design team.

What’s been the biggest challenge in your design hiring process? Let’s discuss.