Design Leaders Should Go “Founder Mode”

Summary: The future of design leadership is not to aspire to ever-higher executive roles, ruling over a vast UX empire. Rather, embrace the “Founder Mode” concept of hands-on and vision-based leadership of small and highly effective design teams.

If you currently are a design leader — or have ambitions of becoming one — you face a dire future, in one way of thinking. The old approach of climbing the corporate ladder from manager to director to AVP to VP to Chief Design Officer will soon be eradicated by AI. No more Grand Poohbah job titles for you.

In Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado (1885), the character Pooh-Bah held multiple high-ranking positions with a pompous air. The future’s super-effective product teams won’t provide many such jobs sitting on top of steep hierarchies. (Midjourney)

AI is a huge productivity booster for all professional jobs. It short-circuits ideation and accelerates design production, from concepts to UI assets. While productivity gains at the individual level are valuable, the true impact of AI on the design profession comes at the team level, where it enables “pizza teams” with few enough members to be fed by two pizzas.

When a team of 10 AI-enabled super-designers can do the work that used to require a UX department of 100, the need for higher management levels shrivels. I call this the “pancaking” of the design profession. Flat hierarchies, high output. Bye bye, communications and coordination overhead.

Are two pizzas enough for your entire design team, including management, to have lunch? If so, you can execute at top speed. (Ideogram)

Don’t despair, dear design leader or design leader aspirant. We still need leadership, even if the leaders aren’t executives. Enter Founder Mode as a model for leading product design and user experience.

Founder Mode vs. Manager Mode

Founder mode and manager mode represent fundamentally different approaches to company leadership. In founder mode, leaders maintain intimate involvement across all organizational levels, frequently engaging in direct interactions with employees regardless of their hierarchical position, and remain deeply connected to the company’s core mission and operational details. Manager mode, in contrast, operates through traditional business hierarchies, where leaders primarily interact with direct reports, delegate extensively, and maintain professional distance through formal organizational structures.

In Founder Mode, the leader owns and promotes the product vision by engaging directly with the design team (and other core teams). In Manager Mode, the leader only talks with the department heads, each of whom is responsible for communicating the vision to his or her individual teams. (Leonardo)

These two concepts were introduced in a talk at the Y Combinator startup incubator by Brian Chesky, the founder (!) of Airbnb. It was further refined in an excellent essay by Paul Graham, Y Combinator's co-founder (!). The essay resonates well with my own much more modest experience as a founder.

The distinction between Founder Moder and Manager Mode has gained significant attention since empirical evidence shows that Fortune 500 companies led by founders do more than twice as well as companies run by non-founders, with stock gains of 202% of the market average (i.e., twice as much) for founder-led companies, whereas companies led by non-founders only gained 92% of the market average (i.e., slightly worse than a random investment).

The following comparison table outlines the main differences between Founder Mode and Manager Mode:

Founder Mode emphasizes fast decisions by the founder, who owns the product vision for product-market fit. Manager Mode emphasizes adherence to the management hierarchy, where new ideas are passed up through the chain of command and delayed by endless committee meetings. (Ideogram)

Design Leaders as Design Founders

As a current Silicon Valley buzzword, Founder Mode is for company CEOs: the word “founder” equals “company founder.” However, I view it as more of a mindset that can apply equally well to people who lead a discipline, even if not the entire company.

Design leaders should embrace the Founder Mode style of leadership. With smaller superteams, all of the characteristics of Founder Mode are the way for a design leader to ensure successful design success. Smaller teams require more visionary leadership, not less.

Of course, some vocabulary in the above comparison table should be adjusted when using Founder Mode to lead design instead of the entire corporation. Most important, product-market fit has a new meaning:

• The “product” now is design (both as a noun and a verb).

• The “market” now is the rest of the organization, especially the engineering and marketing teams and the CEO (who hopefully uses Founder Mode at the corporate level and thus owns the overall product vision).

• The “fit” is how well the design suits the company’s needs and how well the design team works with their colleagues in other disciplines.

“Product-Market Fit” for design leaders in Founder Mode means to make design work fit with the rest of the organization, which constitutes the market for design. (Leonardo)

Good VPs Make Bad Presidents

Traditionally, when the founder leaves a company, the best Vice President is promoted to President of the whole shebang. This has often led to disappointing results or outright failure for formerly successful companies.

Two of the most famous examples of this problem in the technology industry are Tim Cook at Apple and Steve Ballmer at Microsoft.

Apple hasn’t created a breakthrough product since Steve Jobs passed away. Under the new leadership, the company fumbled its automotive efforts and missed the AI revolution big time, still stuck with a lame product two years later. Tim Cook was an excellent supply chain manager who could manufacture Steve Job’s product vision at low cost in large numbers. A wonderful Number Two, but a terrible Number One.

Similarly, Bill Gates embraced hardcore Founder Mode at Microsoft, and Steve Ballmer was an excellent sales executive who could sell sand in Sahara and Windows to enterprise customers. But when Ballmer took over the top job, Microsoft lost out on the cloud transition and couldn’t ship a decent mobile product.

Microsoft also shows that there are exceptions to the rule that “good VPs make bad Presidents.” Once Satya Nadella took over from Ballmer, Microsoft found its step again and has become a leader in the AI era.

The question is not whether a leader is literally the original founder, but whether he or she embraces Founder Mode and is capable of leading in this style. Similarly, even if you take over leadership of a design team from somebody else, you can still embrace Founder Mode in leading design within your company.

These lessons from history apply to design leaders who want to go Founder Mode. You are probably excellent at one of the components of the overall design process. Maybe even more. That’s not enough, and you will fail as a design leader in the new high-efficiency product design world if you’re simply a superb visual designer, interaction designer, or user researcher. Don’t become the design world’s equivalent of Tim Cook or Steve Ballmer.

Be the Satya Nadella, in this analogy. You are now responsible for the design discipline’s product-market fit within your company (as redefined above). Even more important, you own the design vision. These are new skills for many excellent designers — even ones with high positions in traditional management hierarchies in legacy enterprise companies.

About the Author

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a usability pioneer with 41 years experience in UX and the Founder of UX Tigers. He founded the discount usability movement for fast and cheap iterative design, including heuristic evaluation and the 10 usability heuristics. He formulated the eponymous Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience. Named “the king of usability” by Internet Magazine, “the guru of Web page usability” by The New York Times, and “the next best thing to a true time machine” by USA Today.

Previously, Dr. Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and a Member of Research Staff at Bell Communications Research, the branch of Bell Labs owned by the Regional Bell Operating Companies. He is the author of 8 books, including the best-selling Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (published in 22 languages), the foundational Usability Engineering (27,765 citations in Google Scholar), and the pioneering Hypertext and Hypermedia (published two years before the Web launched).

Dr. Nielsen holds 79 United States patents, mainly on making the Internet easier to use. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Human–Computer Interaction Practice from ACM SIGCHI and was named a “Titan of Human Factors” by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

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