Design CEO

For years, designers were relegated to the back office, out of sight in the boardroom. They were called upon when a pitch deck needed refinement or a logo required resizing. Business decisions were made elsewhere by MBAs with spreadsheets or engineers with roadmaps. Designers were expected to "make it pretty" once the real work was done.

But something has changed. The companies capturing the public imagination, the products that feel inevitable, the brands that shape culture; they're being led by people who understand design at a gut level. In some cases, they are designers. And now, taste is being taken seriously.

You don't need to squint too hard to see the pattern. Figma, which we absolutely adore at the studio, once dismissed as "Google Docs for UI," has just listed on the stock exchange with a multi-billion-dollar valuation. Canva, founded by someone who believed that ordinary people deserved access to beautiful tools, is valued at over $65 billion. Airbnb, led by graduates from RISD, didn't become a hospitality giant by owning more property. They built something people wanted to be part of. These aren't one-offs. These are companies leading their categories because of design-first thinking.

In today's market, functionality is expected. Feeling is what differentiates.

So what's really going on? Business is being reshaped, and not only by analysts or engineers, but by people who know how to make things feel right. We've entered an era where products don't win on what they do, but how they make people feel while doing it. We've written before about the power of emotional intelligence in leadership in "EQ vs IQ: The Future is Feelings", and this moment feels like the larger application of that truth.

Designers, especially those fluent in brand language and user experience, are trained to focus on the emotional side of interaction. They pay attention to friction, caring about mood, tone, space, and flow. That kind of attention, once dismissed as "soft," now creates value.

Terms like vibe marketing, vibe branding, and vibe coding have entered the business lexicon for a reason (expressions that we've been fixated on since forever at a small studio. We actually start the week with a Vibe Check). They reflect a market that rewards emotional clarity and connection. The best products aren't functional; they're loved. Designers know how to build that kind of loyalty, not by guessing, but by observing and understanding. We pay close attention to how people behave and their responses. We make decisions not only with logic, but with feeling.

That kind of sensitivity has always been valuable. Now it's profitable.

But let's not get carried away. While design is increasingly central to business strategy, leadership is still more than good taste. It's tempting to believe that just because a product is beautiful, the company behind it will thrive. That's not always the case. Design instincts don't always scale.

The ability to craft a great homepage doesn't mean you can manage a global team or run operations across multiple markets. There's a real danger of aesthetic overreach of prioritizing elegance over execution, or tweaking brand assets while the business model quietly erodes. In "Designed to Lead", we talked about how design needs clarity, not just charisma. That truth applies at the highest levels.

Leadership also requires navigating culture. Designers often speak in nuance, but business demands clarity. Most design work is refined over time in isolation (we avoid that through our processes). Leading a company, especially at scale, is collaborative, messy, and constant. The designer CEO has to resist perfectionism. They have to make decisions with incomplete information. And know when the work is done, even if the kerning isn't quite right. Great leadership is about people. It's about building systems. And sometimes, it's about stepping back from the product to focus on the process.

Still, we believe in the rise of the design CEO. Not because designers are automatically better leaders, but because the definition of leadership is evolving. We talked about this shift in "Creative Confidence", where trust, not ego, is the foundation of influence. The designers who will thrive in leadership roles are the ones who can connect emotional intelligence with strategic thinking. They won't just build nice things, but build organizations that resonate.
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Every CEO should understand design.

This doesn't mean that every designer should aspire to be a CEO. But it does mean every CEO should understand design. If the product is how a business presents itself in the world, then design is how it's perceived. And in a saturated market, being felt matters more than being noticed. The future belongs to leaders who care deeply about what their decisions feel like; not just to customers, but to teams, communities, and partners.

Taste in today's world is direction. A way of filtering complexity and creating clarity. And for the first time in a long time, it's being valued not as decoration, but as guidance.

Designers are here to make things work, while making them matter.

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