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


We Don’t Need Another Framework: On Experiential Authority in Design Leadership
There are two kinds of performance in design.

The first kind is essential: how someone shows up in the work. How they notice the tension in a conversation. How they help a team move forward. How they respond when things get ambiguous or political or just plain hard. This kind of performance is about presence, craft, and consistency. It builds trust over time.

The second kind is dangerous. It’s a performance of expertise—the kind that rewards polish over participation, posture over presence. It’s the person who talks convincingly about “driving clarity” but has never clarified a real, messy decision. The person who shows you their Figma files, but never says why they made anything. It’s expertise rendered as theater.

We keep mistaking the second kind of performance for the first. We hire it. Promote it. Sometimes we even become it. Especially in leadership roles, where it’s easier to talk about the work than to stay inside it.

We don’t need more of that.

We don’t need more frameworks, more clever diagrams, more performative rigor that falls apart the minute reality intervenes. We need something rarer, quieter, and far more durable: experiential authority.

Performed Expertise vs. Lived Experience
The design industry has become incredibly good at staging expertise. We know how to build the case study, name the artifact, and rehearse the narrative. It’s a whole performance economy—especially in interviews, portfolios, and conferences. And let’s be honest: some of it is necessary. Some of it is just how you survive.

But it becomes a problem when we confuse knowing how to talk about the work with knowing how to do it.

Experiential authority doesn’t perform. It participates. It’s the kind of leadership that doesn’t need to announce its presence because it’s already inside the product, inside the team, inside the decision. You feel it—not because someone put it on a slide, but because the work holds together. Because the team feels calm, clear, and capable. Because hard conversations happen, and no one flinches.

It’s not that these people don’t use frameworks—they do. But they don’t hide behind them. They use them as tools, not as shields.

What Experiential Authority Looks Like
You know it when you see it.

  • It’s the design lead who doesn’t just critique the pixels, but the product strategy behind them—and does it without ego.
  • It’s the person who can bridge product, engineering, and design without needing to “own” the room.
  • It’s the one who says, “We’re moving too fast to see clearly. Let’s pause,” and people listen.
  • It’s the leader who joins the critique and doesn’t take over, but makes the conversation better.

They don’t need to show how much they know. They show how much they’ve noticed.

They give clear feedback, grounded in reality. They remember what a junior designer said last week, and they follow up. They have a feel for the pulse of a team—not from surveys or dashboards, but from being there.

They don’t just talk about impact. They make space for it.

Why This Matters
When teams are led by experiential authority instead of performed expertise, everything changes.

  • Collaboration becomes more honest.
  • Feedback becomes more generous and direct.
  • The product improves—not just because someone “owned” the UX, but because people worked like it mattered.
  • Designers start taking real risks because the environment is safe enough to fail.
  • Engineers ask better questions because they trust the intent behind the work.
  • Product managers stop translating everything into roadmaps and start listening to the nuance of what users need.

The ripple effects are everywhere—but they’re especially visible in how decisions get made. With experiential authority in the room, decisions don’t get made faster. They get made better. With more clarity, less ego, and less rework.

Hiring for the Right Kind of Performance

We need to get better at hiring for real performance—the kind that shows up in collaboration, critique, and decision-making—not the kind that just looks good in a portfolio.

Ask:

    •    When was the last time you changed your mind about something important?
    •    Tell me about a time you helped unblock a team that was stuck.
    •    How do you know when your design is done?
    •    What’s the last thing you deleted from a project—and why?

Look for people who talk plainly. Who cite real tradeoffs. Who describe not just what they did, but how it felt. Who don’t need to say “I led” every five minutes.

And if you’re in leadership, show what that looks like. Be transparent about your own learning curve. Don’t perform expertise—model inquiry. Show that it’s not only okay to not know; it’s part of the job.

In Praise of Being In It
There’s a quiet power in the leader who is in it. Not micromanaging. Not hoarding decision-making. Just in it—present, listening, asking the right questions, giving others the tools to make the work stronger.

The kind of leadership that doesn’t need to talk about frameworks because they’ve already shaped one: the emotional and intellectual framework of a functioning team.

That’s the kind of performance we should be hiring for. And that’s the kind of authority design actually needs.