What CEOs need to know about the state of their design function
If your design team isn’t delivering what you expect, the issue may not lie with them. It may be everything around them.
Most CEOs do not have direct visibility into the design function. It often sits under digital, technology, or marketing, far removed from the boardroom. The information reaching you is filtered through layers of leadership, metrics, and assumptions. What looks like slow progress or underwhelming output is usually the result of poor structure, misplaced priorities, and a culture that makes great design difficult to deliver.
You might be feeling the pressure to modernise, especially with the rise of AI promising faster results and leaner teams. But in the rush to stay competitive, there is a growing risk of sidelining your design team just when you should be investing in them most.
This is not about blame. It is about awareness.
Here is what you need to understand in order to unlock the real value of the team you have already invested in.
Broken Hiring and Team Structure
Most design teams report into departments that are not design-led. They sit under technology, digital, or marketing functions, none of which are structured to prioritise or nurture design thinking. This removes design from the strategic level and positions it as a service or support layer. As a result, critical product and experience decisions are often made without meaningful design involvement.
In some cases, the person leading design has no background in the discipline. They may have transitioned from project management or operations, completed a short course at a fancy university that gave them superficial credibility, and stepped into a leadership role because they aligned with the right internal stakeholder. They may be great at reporting upwards, but they often lack the experience to guide design teams through complex, ambiguous challenges.
The consequences of this are long-term. You end up with bloated teams made up of junior staff with no mentorship, senior staff with no authority, and design leaders who cannot lead. This is not a problem of resourcing. It is a problem of structure and responsibility.
Toxic Work Culture
Design thrives in environments that support focus, autonomy, and exploration. But most corporate workspaces are designed for consistency, control, and operational efficiency. Designers are often asked to operate under the same norms as legal, finance, or HR, even though their work requires entirely different conditions.
Telling people to return to the office without addressing what they are returning to does not rebuild culture. What is the point of going into the office to have a Zoom call?
Open-plan floorplans, generic spaces, and restricted software access do not support deep, creative work. Designers find themselves stuck in back-to-back Microsoft Teams meetings, working in environments that are not designed for thinking or problem-solving.
In many organisations, designers are not even allowed to use modern tools that would enable their work. AI tools, cloud platforms, and open-source systems are often blocked by IT, which operates from outdated security models. The result is frustration, inefficiency, and disengagement.
If the team has no space to call their own, they spend half the day trying to find a seat in the new office that has consolidated the entire company into a single space. You no longer needed those extra offices, but now you’ve decided you want everyone back.
Even small blockers, like software restrictions or micromanagement of process, can significantly reduce creative output. Trust your team more than your blanket policies.
Contractor Culture
Contractors are often brought in to boost delivery speed or fill short-term gaps. On paper, it looks like efficiency. In reality, it often leads to inconsistency and friction. These roles are usually filled through expensive consultancies that supply mid-level talent at high rates. While the external staff do their hours and move on, the internal team is left to integrate, fix, and maintain the work.
This creates a two-tier system. Contractors are protected by their agency structure, often better paid, and excluded from internal pressures. The full-time team carries the long-term responsibility, often working overtime out of fear that underperformance will lead to cuts.
Using external contractors is not the issue. The issue is how they are used. If your internal team is constantly cleaning up or onboarding new faces, you are not building capability. You are burning out the very people who are committed to your organisation.
Consultancy Dependency and Outsourcing
External agencies are often given the most exciting work. The rebrands. The campaigns. The vision decks. Internal teams are left with execution and support. This imbalance signals that the in-house team cannot be trusted with strategic work, even if they have the skills and context to do it better.
Worse still, many consultancies do not deeply understand your product, users, or constraints. They hand over incomplete strategies, over-designed concepts, or pitch-driven deliverables that cannot be executed in the real world. The internal team then spends weeks trying to make sense of it all, often with less time, less clarity, and fewer resources.
I once worked with a company that launched a major initiative built by an external agency. The work looked stunning, but when it hit the internal team, nothing fit. It did not align with the tech stack. It ignored user constraints. And it lacked any roadmap for support. Within weeks, it was stripped down and patched just to function. Six months later, the initiative was shut down quietly. The executive who championed it had already moved on. The cost was hundreds of thousands in sunk time, vendor fees, and brand credibility. All of it could have been avoided if the internal team had been trusted from the start.
This cycle creates waste. It damages morale. And it keeps design in a reactive posture.
Shiny Object Syndrome
Many businesses fall into a pattern of investing in new tools, platforms, or features without clear evidence of user need. These initiatives are often driven by senior stakeholders, rushed through third parties, and launched without integration into the broader product strategy.
At its most basic, your product needs to work. That means refining the core flows, fixing small frustrations, and continuing to iterate on what matters most to users. But these basics are often neglected in favour of the new and exciting. You end up chasing parity with competitors, rushing out features to impress the board, or building tools that go unused, all while fundamental user journeys remain broken.
One of the most common mistakes is building features just because a department with the biggest budget asked for them. If you are not using data to trim the fat, identifying what is actually being used and what is just noise, then you are not managing a product. You are feeding a backlog of politics.
Most features are underused. The cost of not focusing is hidden, until the user leaves, the team burns out, or the system starts to collapse under its own weight.
Undervaluing Design
Design is often expected to drive business impact but treated as a cost centre. Salaries are uncompetitive. Career paths are unclear. Titles are capped below what the market recognises. At the same time, consultants and contractors are brought in at higher rates, given more strategic work, and publicly recognised for their contributions.
Worse still, designers are placed on internal career paths that are disconnected from how the design industry actually works. HR frameworks are often modelled after marketing, project management, or IT roles, which makes progress feel performative, not meaningful. Designers are told they cannot have the title that reflects their level because it does not exist in the internal structure. That forces them to leave to grow.
HR teams must stop treating design like an edge case and start collaborating with design leadership to define what growth looks like in this function. That means aligning your job levels, salary bands, and promotion criteria with how the industry operates.
The result is stronger retention, clearer role definition, and a team that can grow with your business instead of out of it.
AI Hype and Creative Fear
AI is changing what’s possible. With a few prompts, you can now create visuals, motion, and layouts that once required the most experienced specialists in the industry. That’s real. But design is not just execution. It’s not something you automate because a dashboard looks good or a pitch deck said so.
When leadership buys into the hype that AI will replace creatives, your team hears it loud and clear. Not as a challenge. As a threat. Instead of being empowered to explore what these tools could unlock, they brace for impact while consultants fly in to present generic strategies designed to sell more software, not solve your specific problems.
AI will not design for you. It will not understand your business. It will not ask the right questions, navigate trade-offs, or tailor solutions to your users. The companies that win are the ones that give their team time to think, space to test, and permission to build better. The ones that lose will chase the trend, generate faster versions of the same broken experiences, and call it innovation.
Disconnected Teams and No Source of Truth
You already have a design system. If you have a product in market, you are relying on shared patterns, components, and conventions. But what was once a tool for clarity and alignment becomes useless when it’s handed off to people who don’t understand its purpose, treat it as a side project, or let it grow without guidance.
Eventually, no one trusts it. Design teams create their own versions. Engineers build around it. Contractors ignore it entirely. Visual inconsistencies creep in, decisions aren’t recorded, documentation is outdated, and every new project starts with a mess someone else created.
This isn’t just inefficient. It erodes brand trust, slows teams down, and disconnects your product from the people building it. You can’t keep scaling teams without a shared foundation. You can’t deliver quality when no one knows what good looks like. And you can’t claim to be design-led if your design system is an abandoned folder full of guesswork.
So How Do You Fix It?
If your design team is underperforming, it is not about adding more people. It is about improving the conditions they work in. Here are eight actions you can take to shift from underperformance to long-term value.
- Fix the org chart
Design should not report into functions that see it as decoration or support. It should be led by an executive who has actually built design teams and products. This gives design a voice in key decisions and ensures that user experience is considered early, not retrofitted later.
You need to hire a design leader who does more than play politics well. Hire someone who is actually a designer. Someone who came up through the design industry. Someone the team will respect because they are one of them. Someone who has been on the tools, shipped real work, and knows the pressure of delivery. They will not be doing the hands-on work anymore, but the experience they bring becomes something the team can aspire to, be motivated by, and learn from. Real credibility, not just corporate credentials.
In fact, some functions could benefit from reporting into design. Marketing’s primary job is to market the product. If they are communicating a brand message that the product cannot deliver on, that is not just a problem for design. That is a trust problem for your business. Marketing output should align with the experience, and design should have sign-off to ensure that happens.
The impact is a more cohesive experience, fewer internal clashes, and stronger alignment between what the business promises and what the user actually gets.
- Build a real team
Contractors are not your core team. They are there to roll out delivery work so your main players can move to the next challenge to solve, like a Seal Team 6. Your best designers should be free to tackle the high-value problems, not trapped in day-to-day production cycles.
While it makes sense to structure around squads, you also need specialists who can move quickly, snipe the biggest problems, and keep momentum alive. Back this up with a strong design ops function whose job is to onboard contractors quickly, plug them into the toolchain, and keep the internal team focused on what matters most.
This leads to lower attrition, reduced dependency on external support, and a team that is solving real problems, not just getting work done.
- Respect the environment design needs to thrive in
Designers need desks. They need walls. They need messy spaces covered in inspiration and personal touches that feel like their own. Give them a place to belong, not a hot desk next to someone measuring quarterly compliance reports.
Let them shoot the shit, sketch ideas on the furniture, be noisy when they need to, and express themselves freely away from the school hall monitors who kill creative flow. And do not let the corporate machine fill another room with the same grey furniture bought in bulk. Invest in their space the same way you invest in your brokers’ bullpens and their sixteen-monitor setups.
You will see higher-quality thinking, stronger team cohesion, and an environment where creativity is not squeezed out of existence.
- Stop outsourcing the fun stuff
Bring in consultancies when your team asks for them, not when leadership feels insecure. Use them to support your team, not to undermine them. Hire specialists who add new thinking or depth, not another rinse-and-repeat pitch deck written by people who will never stay to build anything.
Your in-house team knows your systems, your constraints, and your users. Trust them to lead, and when they call for backup, back them up. Do not replace them.
This produces more consistent design, lower costs over time, and a team that is invested in the outcome, not just the process.
- Kill the shiny-thing pipeline
Use your own people to tell you where to focus. Ask your design team to show you what is happening in market, what they are seeing, what users are gravitating towards. Let them bring ideas to the table before you hire a research company or listen to a suit pitching the next shiny thing.
Refocus on data, craft, quality, and focus. Build what aligns to your product and your brand, not what looks good on a roadmap presentation. Be true to what you are. Stop trying to be everything to everyone and producing watered-down experiences that offer no real value and even less return.
Done well, this leads to better adoption, reduced delivery waste, and stronger, more differentiated products.
- Pay them like they matter
Design is not an optional extra. It is how customers experience everything you offer. You cannot say design matters while locking designers into capped salaries, internal-only career frameworks, and fake progression paths designed to tick HR boxes.
Pay competitively. Recognise design-specific seniority. Let your best people grow inside the business instead of forcing them to leave to earn what they are worth. If they have to choose between loyalty and survival, survival wins.
That is how you build loyalty, retain institutional knowledge, and compete for top-tier talent that powers real growth.
- Empower your team to lead your AI adoption
Form a dedicated research and development squad inside your design team whose sole focus is testing, validating, and integrating AI tools that actually fit your work. Let them experiment, run pilots, and work directly with other designers to stress test what fits the toolchain and adds real value.
Educate the entire design function on how to effectively use these tools. Make AI a lever that enhances creativity, reduces grunt work, and unlocks new thinking. Not something imposed from the outside by vendors with a quarterly target to hit.
You will gain faster workflows, smarter solutions, and a team that becomes stronger and sharper, not weaker and cheaper.
- Invest in your design system and treat it like infrastructure
Make using the design system mandatory. Not to limit creativity, but to give it a strong foundation to build on. Your system is not a set of rules. It is a platform for faster delivery, better consistency, and higher quality without reinventing the wheel every time.
Empower teams to innovate inside the system. Free them to spend more time solving real problems instead of cleaning up inconsistency. Constantly educate, communicate, and demonstrate the value it brings. Build unity, not division.
Staff the system with your best designers, the ones who obsess over every pixel, token, and principle. When you build a system that others want to contribute to, you create a centre of gravity for everything your design team builds.
When treated seriously, it becomes the single most efficient way to scale quality across your entire business.
Final word
If you’re serious about building better products, delivering better experiences, and creating long-term value, then your design team needs more than praise. They need power. They need space. They need leadership that understands their value and an organisation structured to support it.
And no, letting them wear black t-shirts and trendy sneakers while you throw around buzzwords like “customer experience” does not count. That is not investment. That is theatre.
You cannot keep treating design like a downstream service and expecting upstream impact. You cannot outsource vision, underpay talent, overrule process, and then wonder why things do not work. And you definitely cannot keep waiting for someone else in the business to fix it, because no one else will.
If you have built an in-house design team, you already have what you need.
But until you create the conditions for them to thrive, you will never get the return you are hoping for.
This is not about giving design more. It is about expecting more, by making the right investments, setting the right structure, and finally giving it the seat at the table it deserves.
The companies getting design right are already outpacing you. It is not too late to catch up. But it is on you to lead the change.
