John Howrey
Design Leader
ContactCURRENTLY DigitalOcean
PREVIOUSLY SCAD
IBM
Skeptic
Philographica
Selbert Perkins Design

CASE STUDIES
Set Users Up for Success
Empowerment by Design
Driving Growth Through Design
All the World’s a Map
Luxury Reimagined
ABOUT Who I Am, What I Build
Philosophy of Leadership
wRITINGS We Don’t Need Another Framework
Design Leadership Is Cultural Leadership
Designers Should Own the Narrative
Speed and Substance Can Coexist
Collaboration Is the Work
Design as Stewardship of Experience

Design Leadership Is Cultural Leadership
How you build teams is how you build products.

Every team produces culture—whether intentionally or not. Through critique habits, Slack etiquette, hiring choices, project pacing, and how decisions get made (or avoided), culture emerges. And once it’s there, it becomes the environment in which all design work lives.

Design leaders are often asked about velocity, craft, and outcomes. But none of those exist in a vacuum. Culture is the substrate. It defines the quality of the thinking, the pace of decision-making, and the emotional weather of the team.

Before a designer sketches a screen, something else has already been designed: the conditions under which they work. Culture.

Culture Is How Intent Gets Made

Intent is often treated like it arrives from above—a strategic memo, a kickoff deck, a mission statement. But in real teams, intent doesn’t descend. It accumulates. It forms slowly, out of shared conversations, unfinished thoughts, disagreements, and convictions that finally settle into something worth building.

This is why culture matters so deeply. Culture creates the conditions under which a team can form shared intent—or fail to.

When a team doesn’t trust each other, intent fragments. You see endless revisiting of goals. You hear people say, “Wait, I thought we were doing X.” Nobody feels confident in the “why,” because nobody felt safe enough to question it when it was fragile.

When the culture is healthy, intent locks in earlier and more clearly. People know what they’re doing and why. And just as importantly, they know how to push back, reshape, and co-author that purpose together.

Culture isn’t a side effect of good work. It’s the thing that allows good work to happen.

Rituals, Language, and Structure Are How Culture Is Made

Culture doesn’t live in values statements. It lives in rituals, in language, in structure—in the daily mechanics of how people interact.

You can see culture in:

The way critique is facilitated. Who speaks first. Whether junior designers feel safe challenging a lead.
How design decisions are documented. Are they explained? Revisited? Or just implied and silently enforced?
How feedback flows up. Whether ICs are expected to perform certainty, or allowed to show thinking in progress.

These moments may seem small, but they are structural. They tell people what’s expected of them. They teach new hires what’s safe to say. They create guardrails or landmines, depending on how they’re handled.

Design leaders don’t just participate in these moments—they shape them. Intentionally or not, they reinforce the norms by modeling what’s allowed, what’s celebrated, and what’s ignored.

Structure is not bureaucracy. It’s care. A thoughtful structure tells people how to succeed without guessing.

Feedback and Accountability Are Cultural Practices

One of the fastest ways to see a team’s culture is to watch how feedback is given—and received.

On underdeveloped teams, critique becomes a performance. People give feedback that centers their own preferences. You’ll hear “If I were doing this…” instead of “What problem is this solving?”

You’ll hear corrections instead of questions.

But in strong cultures, feedback is generous. It lifts the designer toward their own goals, not someone else’s. The critique becomes a conversation, not a correction. There’s an emotional intelligence to it.

This is where accountability also comes into play—not the weaponized version, but the clear, humane kind. Accountability doesn’t mean assigning blame. It means being in right relationship with your work, your collaborators, and your users.

A team that avoids accountability avoids growth. A team that practices it well becomes more resilient—because it knows how to repair.

Collaboration Is Where Culture Is Tested

It’s easy to believe that culture is what happens inside the design team. But the real test of design culture is how it holds up under cross-functional pressure.

Designers don’t work in isolation. They work alongside PMs, engineers, marketing leads, support, and legal. And it’s in these intersections—these tension points—where culture either stretches or snaps.

When trust is low, collaboration slows down. People hedge, withhold, retreat. Every review becomes a performance. Every meeting is a negotiation. But when culture is strong—when people know how to disagree without damaging trust—those same tension points become creative pressure. They refine the work instead of breaking it.

The best design cultures aren’t the ones where everyone agrees. They’re the ones where disagreement doesn’t derail momentum.

The Culture That Exists When You’re Not in the Room

The truest test of leadership isn’t what happens when you’re present. It’s what persists when you’re gone.

Do decisions hold their shape? Do values stay intact? Do teammates still push for clarity, quality, and care even when no one is watching?

Design leaders eventually scale beyond individual critiques, tickets, or projects. But what they leave behind—that’s the work. The rituals they shaped, the trust they modeled, the accountability they encouraged—that’s what remains.

There’s a kind of real delegation that isn’t just about handing something off. It’s about building a system—human and operational—that can survive without your constant involvement. That’s not abdicating responsibility. That’s leadership that lasts.

Culture Is the Product

The way we gather matters. It matters because how we gather is how we live.

—Priya Parker

Culture is not the thing you do once the product is launched. It’s not a retrospective. It’s not a value engraved on a coffee mug.

It is how we decide. How we critique. How we include. How we name risk. How we act when things get hard.

The best design leaders understand this. They know that shaping the team is shaping the product. That if you want to build something durable, it starts with how people treat each other on a random Tuesday afternoon. It starts with the stories we tell each other about why the work matters—and who it’s for.

If you want to understand a leader’s impact, look at their team six months after they’ve left.

What’s still there?
That’s the legacy.
That’s the product.