Why I built this
And who it's not for.
I spent 18 years in companies where design had to earn its seat every single day.
Not companies where design was part of the strategy from the beginning. Not companies where the CEO came from a product background and already believed. Companies built on engineering logic, sales targets, and quarterly goals. Companies where design was a service function until someone decided to argue otherwise.
I'm not a design leader from a company where design already won the argument.
That sentence used to feel like an apology. It doesn't anymore.
After nearly two decades of that work, across Dell and now Dynatrace, leading teams ranging from a handful of designers to sexty people spread across 5 continents: the Americas (Brazil, USA), Europe (Ireland, Spain, Austria, Germany), the Middle East (Israel), and Asia (India, Malaysia, China, and Japan), I have accumulated a specific kind of knowledge. Not the polished kind you find in case studies. The kind you earn from making a mistake, sitting with the consequences, and figuring out what to do differently next time. The kind that lives in your head and nowhere else.
A few years ago I started noticing something uncomfortable. I would talk to a new design lead. Someone smart, someone who cared, someone clearly capable. And I would watch them struggle with something I had already figured out. Not because they weren't good enough. Because nobody had written it down. I had been through exactly that situation, made exactly that mistake, and learned exactly what worked. And I had kept all of it entirely to myself.
I have changed jobs and left things behind that nobody wrote down. Frameworks that worked. Conversations that changed how I thought about feedback or hiring or direction. Ways of navigating an engineering-led organization that I rebuilt from scratch at the next place because there was no record of the version I had already built.
That bothered me more the longer I sat with it.
There was also something else. When I talked to other design leaders, peers, people I respected, people further along in their careers, I noticed that most of them didn't share this stuff either. Not publicly. The honest account of what it is actually like to lead a design team in an environment that was not built for design. The daily friction. The workarounds. The conversations that don't fit into a LinkedIn post because they're too specific, too uncomfortable, or too far from the aspirational version of design leadership that most content is selling.
So I built Design the Hard Way.
It is a library of playbooks and a biweekly newsletter for design managers and design leads who are doing this work in unglamorous environments. Enterprise software. Engineering-dominated cultures. Distributed teams. Companies where you have to make the case for design's value on a Tuesday morning and then make it again on Wednesday.
Each playbook is a complete, step-by-step guide to one specific leadership challenge. Not a framework with a name. Not a case study from a company with a different set of problems than yours. A practical answer to a real question: what do I actually do next?
The newsletter is shorter. It is a real situation from my work, what it revealed, and one thing you can do differently. Read in five minutes. Useful the same day.
This is not for junior designers figuring out their craft. If that is where you are, there is excellent content for you elsewhere and this is not it. This is for people who are already in the room. People who have been handed a team, or are about to be, or have been leading one for a year and are starting to realize that everything they knew as an individual contributor only gets them so far.
If you have ever felt like you were the only person in your organization with your specific set of problems, you are probably not. You are just in an environment where nobody talks about it.
That is exactly what this is for.