Closer, Not Higher

There’s a piece of conventional wisdom about design leadership I’ve never agreed with. It goes something like this: as you move up, you rise above the details. You stop worrying about pixels. You worry about strategy. You focus on the “big picture.” I think this is wrong. I think it’s always been wrong. And I think what’s happening right now, with AI in the design world, is going to prove it. Here’s what’s actually changing. For the last decade or so, design teams have organized themselves around a shared canvas — Figma, mostly. The canvas became the source of truth. You build a design system in it, and everything downstream — websites, ads, emails, documents — refers back to it. That worked, but it had a cost. Design lived in a kind of speculative environment. You’d approve a design, then someone tried to build it, and you’d discover something didn’t work — a state you hadn’t anticipated, a constraint you hadn’t seen. To keep things in sync, that change had to be brought back to the…