I have never had a direct report — not in any role since 2013, including the three years where my title said manager. What I have instead is a long record of getting design quality out of people under no obligation to give it to me, and a fairly specific idea of what you have to build when you cannot simply decide.
Managers have a shortcut. They can decide something and it happens, because the people doing it work for them.
I have never had that shortcut. Every designer, engineer and vendor whose work I needed to be good could have ignored me at no cost to themselves. So instead of deciding things, I had to make the right way easier than the wrong way — which is a design problem, and it is most of what I have actually done for a living.
I have never owned a performance cycle, and I have never made a hiring decision that was mine to make. Against a job description asking for five years of managing designers, the honest number is zero.
That is the whole of it. Everything below is what I have instead, and I would rather you held the gap while you read it than found it at the bottom.
The reason it may still be worth reading: a manager who loses their authority still has the relationships, the context and the habits. Someone who never had it had to build the mechanism instead — and unlike authority, the mechanism travels.
My first job with manager in the title had no reports in it. It had eleven vendors — six garment units, five accessories — in Tiruppur, Ludhiana, Indore and Mumbai. I wrote the specifications they sampled against. Executives chose from the samples for production. I owned the brief and the quality bar, and nothing else.
I was in my twenties. Most of the people whose work I was rejecting were older than me, senior inside their own businesses, in another city, and often working in a language I spoke badly. There was no version of that conversation I could win on authority, because I had none — and none I could win on rapport, because I saw them twice a year.
What worked was the specification. “This isn’t right” is an opinion, and opinions get argued with. Pointing at the line in the spec that the sample does not meet is a fact, and facts end the conversation quickly and without anyone losing face. So I learned to write the spec as though the argument had already started.
That is the whole trick, and I have not found a better one since.
Five designers worked on and against the design system I led, across every product area on the platform. None of them reported to me. Neither did the engineers consuming it, and neither did the model that became its highest-volume reader.
So the question was never how to get people to comply. It was what to build so that the correct thing was also the cheapest thing to do.
None of that is management. All of it does what management would otherwise have had to do, and it keeps working on days when I am not in the room. How the system was built →
Coaching without a reporting line is voluntary on both sides, which makes the outcomes worth more and the count smaller. Three, over four years. One designer went from contributing occasionally to owning the icon set outright — the whole thing, including decisions I would previously have made. One was promoted to Senior, with wider scope. A third took on requirements and bug triage for a departing colleague’s work.
I would not claim sole credit for any of it. People develop for many reasons and their own managers did the formal part. What I can say is that it was voluntary, that it was sustained, and that they kept coming back.
The one I would point at first is not a coaching outcome at all. A practice I built for in-product guidance was picked up by leads senior to me. Teaching downward is ordinary — people accept help from someone further along. Sideways and upward is the hard direction, because nobody in it has any reason to take the call.
The same thing happened with a written evaluation method: two designers ran it on their own work within a day of seeing it. Adoption by people who did not build the thing is the one signal I have never been able to manufacture. Where that method came from →
Working this way has a failure mode, and my last performance review named it before I did: my leadership was not fully visible across the wider product organisation.
That is not bad luck. It is the method’s bill. Influence that works by making the right thing easy leaves very little trace in the systems an organisation uses to see itself. A decision settled in a review comment, a rule that ended an argument before it started, a mapping that meant an engineer never had to ask — none of those appear in a ticket queue. The work shows up as an absence of problems, and absences do not get reported.
I diagnosed the symptom myself and got the cause wrong. I assumed the fix was to route the same evidence somewhere more visible. It was not. The evidence was fine; the form was wrong. What a room of executives can act on is a number with a method behind it, and I did not have one until someone asked me a question I could not answer.
The honest sequence: I was asked what the design system had bought that an off-the-shelf component library would not have. I did not have the number. I said so rather than inventing one, and then went and built it. The cost case →
Two things are true at once, and I would rather say both.
Against a requirement for years spent managing designers, I do not qualify, and nothing above changes that. It is a filter and I fail it.
Against the question that requirement is standing in for — can this person raise the quality of work they do not control — I have evidence going back to 2013, a method I can describe, and no history of ever having had the org chart to fall back on.
I am happy to go deeper on any of it in conversation, including the parts that did not work.