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It’s a Tough Time to Be a Design Leader

You’re under pressure to prove value. Your team is stretched thin. You’re being asked to deliver more, faster—with fewer resources and less influence. And amidst it all, you're still expected to scale experience, shift mindsets, and somehow make it all stick.

If that feels impossible—you’re not alone. But there is a way. Not by managing harder. But by leading differently. With intention, with systems thinking, and with the design principles you already know by heart.

Experience is More Than Aesthetics

The idea that experience creates value isn’t new. Ever since Pine and Gilmore framed the "Experience Economy" in 1998, businesses have increasingly recognised that thoughtful, human-centred experiences could offer a real competitive edge. By the early 2010s, CX and UX had made their way into boardrooms. Design was no longer just about aesthetics — it began shaping products, services, and strategy. 

I came into this field during a time of immense momentum. The world was hungry for innovation — and design was having a moment. IDEO and the likes had sparked a global Human-Centered Design movement, and suddenly every company wanted to be part of it. I was lucky to start my career in the middle of that wave, as a young Human-Centered Design consultant at Swisscom — one of the few companies in Switzerland that had already committed to the game early on — and continued that journey at Creaholic, Fjord (now Accenture Song), and now at Frēa. 

Over the past five years, the pace of digitalisation — accelerated by the pandemic — has intensified. Global trade disruptions and economic volatility pushed companies to prioritise leaner operations and faster execution. At first, it felt like progress. Agile ways of working promised speed, flexibility, and empowered teams. And for a while, it worked. Human-centred design and agile were speaking the same language — test, iterate, improve. We believed we were building better things, faster. However, Digitalisation, once a path to better experiences, increasingly became a tool for efficiency. 

The Shift 

“We don’t have time for research.” 
“Where are the designs? We’ve got development capacity sitting idle.” 
“No time to test — the release is next week.” 

Does this sound familiar? Speed became the benchmark. Output became the measure.  
Quietly, the space for discovery and reflection began to shrink. The intent to build for people was overtaken by the urgency to ship to market. 

We entered a kind of neo-industrial agile reality — where people no longer solve problems, but service backlogs. It’s not that agile or digitalisation are inherently flawed. They’re powerful when guided by the right intent. But without a human-centred compass, speed and scale alone can take us somewhere we never meant to go. 

This shift wasn’t just philosophical — it changed how design teams were structured. Many organisations moved away from centralised design functions and adopted decentralised or embedded models. Designers were placed directly into product teams, closer to delivery, and often under pressure to execute — not question. While this brought speed and integration, it also fragmented design leadership, diluted community, and made it harder to step back and see the whole system. Design became more efficient — but less empowered. 

What happened? It seemed at first, we were on the right path. Slowly but surely, organisations were beginning to invest in experience — not just in pixels and prototypes, but in people, systems, and ways of working. The ambition was there: to build truly experience-centric organisations from the inside out. But then came the pressure. Economic uncertainty. The push for efficiency. The demand to deliver faster, cheaper, now. 

If building experience capability is a marathon, we’re now running into strong headwinds. The pace has picked up, but the direction has shifted. And the cause we were running for? It’s at risk of collapsing under the promise of short-term gains of productivity. 

Experience in Decline 

Customer satisfaction is falling — not just in isolated markets, but globally. According to KPMG, satisfaction declined in 19 of 21 countries surveyed. Forrester’s CX Index has dropped for two consecutive years, now hitting its lowest point since 2016. 

Behind this is a sobering shift: organisations are pulling back their investments in experience. A 2023 Forrester report projected that 20% of CX teams would be eliminated due to budget cuts and restructuring. Experience is still often seen as a cost — a “nice to have” in good times, a liability when margins tighten. And many experience leaders have struggled to frame their work as business-critical. As a result, when pressure mounts, experience is one of the first things to go. 

Yet the data continues to show: design-led companies consistently outperform. Brands that prioritise customer experience report up to 80% revenue growth. Customer-obsessed organisations post double-digit performance gains. The problem isn’t that experience doesn’t drive value. The problem is that we’ve failed to scale it in a way that sticks. 

A Call for Leadership 

Many experience leaders find themselves overwhelmed — expected to “scale experience-centricity,” whether it’s called customer centricity, user centricity, or human-centered design. But without the right approach — and without pulling the right organisational levers — the impact often stays surface-level. 

This is where leadership comes in. 

Because scaling experience isn’t about flying the flag. It’s not about evangelising culture, running design sprints, tracking NPS, or maintaining the design system. Those things matter — but they’re not enough, if not directed to a greater vision. 

What matters is enabling the organisation — structurally, culturally, and strategically — to deliver better experiences, consistently. That’s not a function. It’s not a job title. It’s a leadership responsibility. And too often, it still has no one’s name on it. 

See the System 

Most experience efforts fail not because the tools are wrong, but because the thinking is too narrow. Teams get trapped in delivery — shipping faster, tracking metrics, maintaining systems. Useful? Yes. Transformative? No. 

To elevate experience, we need to zoom out. Stop thinking in silos — CX, UX, EX — and start thinking systemically. Because experience isn’t a function or a roadmap. It’s a living, multi-dimensional system. 
 

Leading Experience requires to see the whole Experience system.

And yes — it’s complex. It cuts across strategy, governance, culture, tooling, research, and measurement. But once you see it as a system, you start to see the levers. And once you see the levers, you can shift them — with intention. 

Know Where to Start — and Where to Go 

Creating differentiated experiences doesn’t start with better toolkits. It starts with better leadership. With knowing where your organisation stands today and is moving towards. With defining a shared ambition that aligns to your business, and identifying what it takes to move. 

At Frea, we help teams find that clarity. There’s no one-size-fits-all playbook. But there is a path. And it starts with understanding where we are today,  

Where is your organisation today - and what is your ambition? (Inspired by Nielsen UX Maturity Model)

Lead by Story 

You can’t tackle everything at once. Scaling experience isn’t about fixing it all — it’s about leading with vision and building the story that connects today’s actions to tomorrow’s ambition. 

Think of it like a hero’s journey. Real transformation doesn’t happen in one chapter. It’s a series of arcs — tension, struggle, growth. That’s what experience leadership is: knowing how to cast the journey, name the milestones, and keep people moving through the mess. 

And as designers, we already have the tools: 

Empathise — with people inside the organisation, not just customers. 

Collaborate — across silos, not just within teams. 

Prototype — new ways of working. 

Iterate — because change isn’t linear. 

Reflect — to learn and realign. 

Lead with creativity — not just to solve, but to reimagine. 

These aren’t soft skills. They’re design skills. And when applied to organisations, they become leadership tools. 

Step Up — Before We Spiral Down

If you’re a design leader — in CX, UX, or anywhere in between — this is your moment. 

The pressure to do more with less is real. But efficiency isn’t a strategy — it’s a constraint. And when it becomes the core operating principle, it leads to a downward spiral: less risk, less differentiation, less resilience. 

Studies show that 50–70% of business process reengineering and cost-cutting programs fail to deliver sustained results. The short-term gains rarely last. What we need now isn’t more optimisation. We need imagination. We need leadership. 

And that means stepping up. Not to protect design — but to activate it. As a driver of transformation. As a bridge between people and systems. As a way to rehumanise how we work and serve.