About this site

Design the Hard Way

Most design leadership content was written by people who work at companies where design already won the argument. You probably know that. You've tried their advice. And you've noticed it doesn't quite fit the room you're actually in.

This publication is for the other kind of design leader. The one whose engineering partner doesn't lose sleep over design quality. The one who has to justify headcount every cycle. The one who inherited a team with no direction, no principles, and a backlog that was clearly built without them in mind. The one who is doing this the hard way. Not by choice. By circumstance.

That's who I built this for.

My name is Marcos Nähr. I've spent nearly 20 years leading design in companies where design had to prove its value every single day. Eighteen of those years at Dell Technologies, building design systems, establishing design operations, and introducing product practices into an engineering organization that had never heard the word "trio." Now I lead a 30-person design organization at Dynatrace, a 5,000-person enterprise software company that runs, as most do, on engineering and sales logic.

I am not a design leader from a design-first company. I never got to work somewhere that treated design as a given. And I've stopped thinking of that as a gap in my resume.

What you find here are playbooks. Not frameworks with aspirational verbs. Not case studies from Figma or Airbnb. Actual step-by-step guides for the situations nobody else writes about: how to hire your first designer when HR doesn't understand what you need, how to give a performance review to the designer who is technically excellent but making your culture worse, how to set a team direction when the product strategy changes every quarter.

There's also a newsletter. Every issue starts with a real situation from my work, names what it reveals about design leadership in unglamorous environments, and gives you one concrete thing you can do differently. You can read it in five minutes. It's useful the same day.

The newsletter is free.
Subscribers get access to the full playbook library.

If you've read this far and it sounds like I'm talking to you, I probably am. Subscribe. I'll be here every two weeks.

Marcos Nähr
20+ years in the trenches.