Design leadership suffers from the same diagnostic problem that plagues most organizational practices: we mistake activity for impact, and busyness for effectiveness. Design teams can appear highly functional—shipping features, running workshops, updating design systems—while being fundamentally misaligned with what their organization needs. I started keeping track of what my team was working on versus what kept getting deprioritized. People were burning out from constant context switching, but I couldn’t figure out how to help them.
The problem hit me during a particularly brutal quarter at Meta. Teams optimized for one set of capabilities would suddenly find themselves irrelevant when the business’s focus changed. Individual designers who excelled in their craft struggled to find strategic relevance. That’s when I started thinking about design teams as organisms that needed to adapt to survive organizational changes. I developed the Design Pulse framework, a method for continuously assessing how design capabilities align with organizational needs. This organizational design health diagnostic became the lens through which I practiced my design leadership responsibilities, using real-time assessment to guide capability development and resource allocation.
Design Pulse as an Organizational Diagnostic
The pulse framework, in its inception, asked “What does design leadership health look like in this organizational context, and how do we continuously assess and adjust our capabilities relative to shifting organizational needs?” Design teams typically optimize for consistency by developing stable processes, defining roles, and ensuring predictable outputs. However, organizational design health requires adaptive capacity —the ability to shift focus, reallocate resources, and develop new capabilities as organizational contexts change.
Rather than annual reviews or quarterly check-ins, Design Pulse works in real time. We use colors in the pulse diagram, where green represents capabilities receiving active development that we worked on that week. Yellow showed capabilities maintained at current levels. Red represented capabilities that haven’t received organizational attention or development for extended periods. That was a huge column. We had designers with deep expertise in areas that Meta had essentially abandoned, but nobody wanted to admit it. More problematic, we kept trying to maintain capabilities in the yellow column that were draining energy from the green work that actually mattered.
The pulse became an organizational health monitoring tool. The color system reveals patterns of organizational attention, resource allocation, and capability development that determine design’s strategic relevance.
The Five Organizational Layers
Personal Level Pulse: Leadership Development Health
Asks: How well does individual design leadership development serve organizational design capacity building?
- Green Indicators: Leadership development focused on capabilities needed for current organizational challenges, active cross-organizational relationship building, and leadership skill development integrated with organizational design impact.
- Yellow Indicators: Standard leadership development activities, some cross-organizational engagement, leadership skills maintained at current levels.
- Red Indicators: Leadership development disconnected from organizational needs, individual leadership optimization not contributing to organizational design capacity, and leadership development focused on generic rather than context-specific capabilities.