Design Leadership at Scale

Company: HubSpot
Role: Senior Design Manager, Breeze AI
Project Team: Interns to Principals

TL;DR

As HubSpot scaled rapidly, my role shifted from guiding design teams as a player-coach to building the conditions for consistently high-quality outcomes. Over time, that evolved into focusing on strategy and growing the business. I hired and developed designers from intern to principal level, set and defended a high quality bar, and led teams through reorgs and hard decisions. The core lesson: strong designers create extraordinary leverage. When you hire well and hold the bar, teams become self-sustaining. Designers as tastemakers means their teams trust them and follow their lead.

Context

By 2025, HubSpot was operating at significant scale across multiple product lines, with increasing organisational complexity and a growing emphasis on AI-first experiences. Design teams were growing quickly, expectations were rising, and leadership quality became a limiting factor. My remit expanded beyond product execution into hiring, performance management, and team design, particularly as teams scaled and cross-functional dependencies increased.

This period coincided with some of the hardest management challenges of my career: rapid hiring, promotion decisions, extended leaves, and reorgs.

Hiring and Setting the Bar

One of the clearest lessons from this period was that the most impactful thing a design leader can do is hire well. Strong designers consistently demonstrate taste, judgment, and an ability to operate autonomously within ambiguity. They understand how to work with engineers, how to ship the right thing, and how to raise the quality of everything around them.

When hiring, I optimised for:

• Strong product judgment over narrow craft specialisation
• Autonomy and the ability to operate without constant direction
• Comfort working directly with engineering and product partners
• Taste and clarity in decision-making

One of the most underrated benefits of hiring designers with genuine taste is the trust it creates across the team. When a designer consistently demonstrates strong aesthetic and product judgment, their cross-functional partners (engineers, PMs, researchers) begin to trust them as the tastemaker. That trust fundamentally changes the dynamic. There is less time spent debating direction, fewer challenges to design decisions, and more energy flowing toward building. The designer earns authority through the quality of their work, not through process or hierarchy.

Designers who met this bar created outsized impact. They built momentum, raised standards organically, and gave leadership time back for strategy rather than supervision. Every strong hire compounded: they attracted better candidates, elevated critique sessions, and set an implicit standard that pulled the whole team forward.

The Compounding Effect of Strong Teams

Over time, a clear pattern emerged. Designers who were truly performing did not need heavy management infrastructure. Their growth was evident in outcomes: shipped work, usage metrics, customer satisfaction, and team impact. Career conversations followed naturally from results. One-to-ones became strategic rather than corrective.

This trust compounded at the team level too. When every designer on a team had earned the confidence of their partners, the entire team moved faster. Fewer review cycles, less second-guessing, more shipping. The design function became an accelerant, with teams spending less time debating and more time building.

This effect became especially visible under pressure. During one period, a senior designer was on extended leave while I was actively recruiting another senior role. I filled in on the team we were hiring for, while two other senior designers covered for the role on leave. Everyone was stretched thin. In that environment, the strength of the team became undeniable. Strong performers stepped up, closed gaps without prompting, and kept quality high despite the constraints. It reinforced something I had seen repeatedly: a team built on the right hires is resilient by default.

Holding the Bar

Setting a high bar only matters if you defend it. One of the harder lessons from this period was that investing heavily in coaching someone toward a bar they are not reaching can delay decisions that would benefit the whole team. Shared critique and mentorship can sharpen many designers, but there are fundamentals (judgment, taste, autonomous problem-solving) that either exist or do not.

I managed multiple performance improvement plans and exits during this period. These were difficult decisions, but consistently the right ones. In every case, the team became healthier, standards became clearer, and overall output improved. I learned that avoiding hard conversations in the name of empathy often costs more, in time, morale, and focus, than addressing them directly. The kindest thing you can do for a team is be honest about the bar and consistent in holding it.

With hindsight, I would set and defend the bar earlier and more explicitly. Early in this period, I was overly optimistic that effort and support could close every gap. Experience taught me that clarity about expectations, delivered early and often, is more respectful than indefinite patience.

Leading Through Organisational Change

In parallel, HubSpot underwent significant organisational change. After contributing to the vision for a new AI-first experience, the reorganisation required to resource it resulted in reorgs affecting approximately twenty-five percent of the group, including a designer on my team.

Leading through this period required balancing transparency, empathy, and forward momentum. It reinforced the reality that leadership is not only about growing teams, but also about navigating contraction responsibly while maintaining trust and clarity for those who remain.

Impact

• Built and scaled high-performing design teams across multiple product areas
• Established and enforced a clear quality bar for senior design roles
• Made difficult performance decisions that improved team health and output
• Led teams through reorgs with clarity and stability
• Reduced management overhead by optimising for autonomy and judgment

Reflection

Design leadership at scale is less about process and more about people. When you hire designers with strong judgment and taste, and hold a consistent quality bar, teams become self-sustaining. Designers earn the trust of their partners, decisions flow faster, and leadership time shifts from remediation to strategy, vision, and organisational design. The most important work of a senior design leader is not producing artifacts. It is building teams that consistently produce high-quality outcomes without constant intervention. Every strong hire is a multiplier. The bar is the strategy.