Design leaders today face a familiar challenge: how do you move beyond being seen as a service team and build structural influence that makes design impact accessible across your organization? I’ve spent 6 years working to develop my design teams from isolated functions into interactive systems and infrastructure. Designers are expected to take on multifaceted responsibilities, including leading design teams, meeting business goals, and building cross-functional alliances.
My Scalar Leadership Approach fuses personal development, team building, and organizational influence as a system of interconnected parts that make the “whole” of design functions.
It is a framework for building design currency through a systems design lens of design management & leadership across three scales of impact: Scale Deep (design the people systems), Scale Wide (design the collaboration systems), and Scale Up (organizations are designable systems). In this blog, I share what worked, what didn’t, and how you might apply this thinking to your own organization.
The framework operates across three scales:
Scale Deep: Design the People Systems
Build individual capability and team cohesion through team rituals, design documentation, structured learning, psychological safety, and operational resilience.
Scale Wide: Design the Collaboration Systems
Distribute design thinking across functions through design KPIs, accessible frameworks, transparent documentation, and clear service models.
Scale Up: Organizations are Designable Systems
Embed design into institutional decision-making through strategic frameworks, leadership influence, and systems integration of design value across org.
Each scale operates across five dimensions—Personal, Product, Team, Strategy, Company—and together they build design currency: the structural influence design has in organizational decision-making, resource allocation, and strategic direction. Here’s how to apply this thinking in practice.
1. Scale Deep: Design the People Systems
Start with individual capability and team cohesion. Nobody does their best work when they’re operating in isolation, unclear about their growth path, or unsure whether they can make autonomous decisions. Scale Deep is about designing the people systems that create individual capability, team cohesion, psychological safety, and operational resilience.
At Meta, I build teams with what I’d call a systems-thinking mentality—people who have the skills, background, and motivation to make decisions based on their ingenuity. My role? Provide the tools, guidance, and training, then get out of the way so they can achieve results. This requires what I call “air cover”—knowing team members as whole people, understanding their values and goals both inside and outside of work, and creating conditions where resources, belonging, and growth paths intersect.
Here’s what I’ve learned: trust and accountability go hand in hand. Team members achieve their self-defined targets within mutually beneficial projects with defined scope, milestones, and clear endpoints. This creates a two-sided relationship in which designers feel autonomous and self-accountable.
Here’s how you can build Scale Deep capability:
- Practice deep personal care. Create clear advancement opportunities paired with mentorship. Assign projects that align the company’s needs with individual growth aspirations—this ensures people can have the impact they want within the system.
- Build psychological safety. Create spaces for open, honest dialogue within design teams and with cross-functional partners. It should feel equally acceptable to share a rough sketch or the final design.
- Stay close to the work. Work closely enough with team members to help surface questions and problems that may not have occurred to them yet. Remain close enough to understand and anticipate projects while providing tools to remove barriers.
- Define clear roles and outcomes. Allocate staff strategically, plan workstreams, track progress, and define roles with clear definitions of done. This operational clarity seems to build resilience.
- Develop craft systematically. Improve craft through structured learning. Define career growth paths with meaningful targets that team members can hold themselves accountable for achieving.
2. Scale Wide: Design the Collaboration Systems
Distribute design thinking across functions. Once you have a capable, cohesive team, the next challenge is expanding influence beyond design. Scale Wide is about designing collaboration systems that distribute design thinking across cross-functional partners through accessible frameworks, transparent documentation, and clear service models.
I’ve found that complex challenges—AI integration, platform development, strategic product decisions—aren’t really siloed. They blend technical, social, and market elements. The key is creating spaces for what I call productive friction, where different forms of expertise intersect to generate new possibilities. At Meta, this meant joint workshops with engineers, collaborative design sessions with product managers, and structured knowledge exchange between disciplines.
Building design currency at this level requires making design thinking accessible to non-designers. Not through evangelism or persuasion, but through transparent processes that build trust, documented decision-making that creates clarity, and service models that define how teams engage with design.
Here’s how you can expand Scale Wide influence:
- Make design accessible through frameworks. Create clear collaboration frameworks that non-designers can use independently. Document design principles and decision-making processes so they’re transparent and replicable.
- Cultivate specific attitudes. Foster a “design as a team” mentality—designers and non-designers as teammates, not adversaries. Encourage what some call a “founder mindset” where all disciplines embrace resourceful thinking. Model “everything is my job”—taking on whatever’s needed to help others leverage design thinking.
- Design for productive friction. Create structured opportunities where different expertise intersects—joint workshops, collaborative design critiques with engineers, cross-functional feedback sessions. These moments tend to generate fresh solutions.
- Build service models. Define clear engagement pathways. How do teams request design support? How are projects scoped? How are decisions made? Clarity here prevents design from becoming a bottleneck.
- Measure collaborative success. Track metrics that reflect cross-functional integration: Are non-design teams independently applying design frameworks? Is design thinking distributed throughout product development?
3. Scale Up: Organizations are Designable Systems
Embed design into institutional decision-making. Even with strong teams and cross-functional collaboration, design influence can still feel localized. Scale Up recognizes a fundamental truth: organizations are designable systems. You can treat organizational structures, policies, and strategic frameworks as redesignable rather than fixed constraints. Accept “no’s and then learn to turn those no’s to “yes”
This was probably the hardest lesson for me. Organizations are designable. When Scale Deep and Scale Wide work together, they create the foundation for Scale Up—strategic influence where design input becomes essential to how the organization makes decisions, allocates resources, and sets direction.
At Meta, this meant engaging with leadership to gain buy-in, defining what design means for the organization proactively, and building capacity and infrastructure that supports design’s expanded influence. But it required patience—changes at this scale face resistance from entrenched behaviors.
Here’s how you can build Scale Up influence:
- Define design’s role proactively. Don’t wait for non-designers to determine how design contributes. I help organizations understand that design means: (1) Building skateboards, not car frames—iterating MVPs toward solutions, not building isolated components. (2) Experiments, not debates—testing and learning together. (3) Success isn’t speed—carving space to improve outcomes, not just ship faster.
- Design strategic frameworks. Create frameworks that guide institutional decision-making. Develop design roadmaps that align with organizational objectives. Plan budgets that reflect design’s strategic importance.
- Build coalitions with leadership. Influence upward by building relationships with executives. Develop strategic communication skills to advocate for design at leadership levels. Collaborate with cross-functional leaders to make design central to organizational objectives.
- Embed design in policies and processes. Work to integrate design thinking into hiring processes, budget allocations, and strategic planning. Make design part of governance, not just execution.
- Demonstrate strategic value. Connect design work to business impact. Show how design decisions influence organizational bottom line, culture, employee motivation, and strategic positioning.
4. Map decisions across five dimensions
One of my bigger realizations: leadership decisions rarely affect just one area. They cascade across multiple dimensions at once. I developed a way of mapping interventions across five interconnected dimensions: Personal (individual growth), Product (user experience), Team (collective capability), Strategy (methodology and frameworks), and Company (institutional integration).
When we implemented a new design system at Meta, for example, I could map its ripple effects: individual skill development in the new system (Personal), changes in how teams collaborated around shared components (Team), strategic design differentiation through consistency (Strategy), improvements in product quality and coherence (Product), and advances in organizational design maturity (Company).
Dimensional thinking helps you anticipate unintended consequences and design interventions that create positive cascades across multiple areas rather than isolated improvements. It reveals the benefits and burdens to systems and actors that design distributes.
Here’s how you can apply dimensional thinking:
- Before major decisions, map across dimensions. Ask: How does this affect individual growth? Product execution? Team dynamics? Strategic positioning? Institutional integration? This reveals hidden impacts.
- Design for compound effects. Look for interventions that create positive cascades across multiple dimensions. A new collaboration ritual (Team) might also improve strategic alignment (Strategy) and institutional knowledge (Company). Additionally, look for negative impacts and spend extra effort on reducing their impact.
- Balance across dimensions. Don’t optimize one dimension at the expense of others. Strong product execution (Product) without team cohesion (Team) doesn’t seem sustainable. Strategic influence (Company) without individual capability (Personal) lacks foundation.
- Use dimensions diagnostically. When something isn’t working, map which dimensions have support versus resistance. This reveals where change will flow easily and where it’ll face friction.
- Structure roles across dimensions. A senior designer might operate primarily at Scale Wide (cross-functional collaboration) while developing Scale Up capabilities (strategic influence) across multiple dimensions.
5. Measure success through design currency
In an increasingly pressured environment, it’s tempting to measure design success through outputs and its impact on the product roadmap—number of products shipped, features launched, speed of delivery, and the quality of the user experience. But I’ve learned that real influence is measured differently: through design currency, the structural influence design has in organizational decision-making, resource allocation, and strategic direction.
Design currency represents how embedded design thinking becomes in the institutional fabric, not just in deliverables but in how the organization operates. At each scale, it appears differently:
Scale Deep: Team cohesion, individual designer progression, operational resilience, autonomous decision-making, and knowledge capital built within design.
Scale Wide: Non-design teams independently applying design frameworks, transparent documentation usage, service model adoption, distributed thinking in cross-functional decisions, and collaborative ownership of outcomes.
Scale Up: Design input embedded in strategic planning, resource allocation reflecting design’s strategic importance, leadership engagement with design frameworks, systemic integration in policies, design’s influence on organizational culture.
Here’s how you can build and measure design currency:
- Track structural influence, not outputs. Ask: Is design input sought before major strategic decisions? Do budget conversations include design impact as a primary consideration? Are design frameworks referenced in strategy documents?
- Look for cultural integration. Do non-designers use design language and frameworks in their daily work? Are design principles embedded in organizational policies? Is design part of governance discussions?
- Measure autonomous adoption. Do teams use design frameworks without designers in the room? This is probably the ultimate test—design becomes “how we work” rather than “what design does.” This is incredibly difficult to see unless design is part of the key business strategic offerings.
- Document institutional memory. Create visible evidence of design’s strategic impact. Use metrics to demonstrate how better design translates to business value. Show that design quality can accelerate engineering efficiency over time.
- Communicate widely. Share your thinking, not just deliverables. Use async walk-throughs, Loom videos, and simple slide decks to broadcast progress and lessons learned. Make design currency visible across the company.
6. Apply the framework as a diagnostic tool
The Scalar framework isn’t a rigid process. It’s more like a lens for seeing how leadership decisions cascade through interconnected systems. I use it diagnostically when facing challenges: Which scale does this operate at? Which dimensions does it affect? What conditions need to exist for this intervention to create positive cascades?
When facing a quality issue, for example, scalar thinking helps me see whether it’s a Scale Deep problem (team capability or psychological safety). A Scale Wide problem (unclear collaboration frameworks or documentation)? Or a Scale Up problem (misaligned incentives or institutional pressure for speed over quality)? The answer determines the intervention.
The framework also serves multiple purposes beyond my own leadership development. Individual designers use it to map their strengths and plan growth. Teams use it to structure roles that leverage interconnections between scales. The organization uses it to analyze how decisions cascade and where change will likely face friction.
Here’s how you can apply it diagnostically:
- Start with observation. Before making changes, map informal networks. Where does design currency already exist? Where does resistance appear? Look for patterns in how decisions ripple across teams and functions.
- Design small experiments. Test changes, such as new feedback rituals or collaboration formats. Watch for second-order effects—how does a change in one area affect seemingly unrelated domains? Build from what works.
- Use it for individual development. Help designers map their current strengths across scales and dimensions. Identify which areas need development. This creates clearer growth paths aligned with organizational needs.
- Structure teams strategically. Map team capabilities and gaps across the framework. Design roles that leverage interconnections—a senior designer operating at Scale Wide while developing Scale Up capabilities.
- Anticipate resistance. Identify which framework intersections have organizational support versus resistance. This reveals where change will flow easily and where it’ll face friction, helping you strategize accordingly.
7. Adapt to your context and remember the craft
Every team and organization is different. What energized teams at 37signals wouldn’t work at Meta, and what works in a startup might drain teams in a large corporation. The framework is a lens, not a prescription. Cultural context, organizational maturity, and resource availability all affect how you apply scalar thinking.
I also learned an important limitation: the Scalar framework is only a lens and guide. Beyond implementing this approach, staying close to the craft remains crucial. I still participate in hands-on prototyping, validate ideas before proposing them to the team, and talk to customers. These activities help me unblock teams, gain credibility with my feedback, and help the team work toward design excellence.
Building design currency takes time, and measuring long-term systemic outcomes is difficult—metrics often lag actual impact. Resistance from entrenched behaviors is normal, especially at Scale Up. The framework won’t solve resource constraints or structural inequalities, but it may offer grounded ways to work within these realities while building toward change.
Here’s how you can adapt and apply it:
- Start where you are. You don’t need to implement all three scales at once. Start with Scale Deep if teams lack capability or cohesion. Start with Scale Wide if the capability exists but collaboration is siloed. Start with Scale Up if you have strong teams and cross-functional integration but lack institutional influence.
- Build curious relationships. Cross-functional trust emerges from genuine curiosity about other disciplines’ constraints, goals, and expertise. This foundation becomes essential for productive friction that generates solutions.
- Stay close to the craft. Don’t let framework thinking replace hands-on work. Prototype, validate, talk to customers, create clarity through systems thinking. This builds the credibility you’ll need for influence.
- Acknowledge trial and error. Be honest when you don’t know the answer. Model vulnerability and candor. Building design currency is improvisational—no framework captures everything.
- Focus on what works for your team. Those needs will shift over time, but these core principles—building capability, distributing thinking, embedding influence—will set you up for success no matter what the next chapter looks like.
Building for the long term
Adaptability and influence don’t happen by accident. They’re products of intentional leadership, systematic infrastructure, and designing conditions that make design impact accessible at every scale. The Scalar Leadership Approach shifts focus from “How can I become a better leader?” to “How can I create conditions where leadership emerges within interconnected systems?”
You’re not trying to embody some ideal of leadership—you’re designing conditions where people’s best qualities can emerge and contribute to collective objectives. Start with building individual capability and team cohesion (Scale Deep: design the people systems). Expand to distributing design thinking across functions (Scale Wide: design the collaboration systems). Establish institutional influence that embeds design into decision-making (Scale Up: organizations are designable systems). Map decisions across five dimensions to anticipate cascading effects. Measure success through design currency, not outputs. And adapt the framework to your unique organizational reality.
Every organization is different, so more than anything, focus on what works for your team and their unique needs. Building design currency is a long game, but when you get it right, design becomes infrastructure, not service. And that’s when real impact becomes possible.
References
- Cameron Tonkinwise — Designing for Transitions
- Ezio Manzini — Design, When Everybody Designs
- Nielsen Norman Group — UX Maturity Models and Organizational UX
- IDEO — Designing Organizations for Change
- Gartner — Design Leadership and Organizational Change
- Accenture — The Business Value of Design