Design unfiltered: accountability without authority
One of the most frustrating realities of being a design leader is that design is often held accountable for outcomes without having the authority to drive the decisions that shape them.
We’re asked to improve adoption, fix retention, reduce friction, “make the product experience better,” and elevate brand perception. But the levers that actually move those needles - roadmap priorities, overarching resourcing decisions, sales promises, technical debt - usually sit outside design’s control.
How it plays out
Adoption: A product launches with gaps because engineering was under-resourced and corners were cut. Six months later, adoption numbers lag. The conversation? “Why didn’t design make this simpler?”
Retention: Sales promised features that don’t exist. Customers churn when reality doesn’t match the pitch. The postmortem? “Design didn’t make the value clear enough.”
Usability: Years of technical debt create fragmented workflows and inconsistent performance. Support tickets pile up. Leadership points the finger at “design quality.”
“Good UI”: A leader declares the UI “isn’t good enough” without ever having defined what good means in the first place. Is it consistency with the design system? Conversion performance? Accessibility compliance? Visual polish? Everyone is working from a different set of assumptions and often, a different set of priorities, and design gets blamed for not hitting expectations that were never articulated.
There’s often a pattern here: when outcomes are positive, credit diffuses to market conditions, pricing, sales, or “the team.” When outcomes are negative, it becomes easy to point fingers at design.
Navigating the imbalance
You can’t brute-force your way out of this. “Influence only” is not a sustainable operating model. But you can make choices about how to navigate it:
Map the levers: Get brutally clear on which outcomes design can directly influence versus those dependent on others. Call that out early and often so accountability doesn’t get misapplied. Use a DACI/RACI matrix to get it on paper.
Frame outcomes as shared: Position success and failure as cross-functional. Adoption, retention, churn - these are not design metrics; they are business metrics. Usability, accessibility, consistency - these are engineering, product, and design metrics.
Agree on success metrics as a group: Don’t let each function invent its own scoreboard. If design is being measured on usability, then product and engineering should be measured on it too. Define success together, write it down, and review it together. Otherwise, you end up in the familiar trap where design is judged against subjective standards while other functions are judged against objective ones. Shared accountability only works if you’re all looking at the same scorecard.
Related to success metrics - define “good” and “done” up front (or whatever the bar is for your work/project): Don’t accept vague standards. Push stakeholders to articulate what good actually UI means, so design isn’t left holding the bag on someone else’s moving target. Get clear on definitions for each measure, like “consistency” so there’s no disagreement later of what was meant.
Pick your battles: Sometimes you can’t win the authority fight in the moment. Decide where influence is worth spending political capital, and where it’s better to conserve energy for the battles that matter most.
Know when to stop navigating: If design is consistently accountable without authority, and if you’re the scapegoat on repeat, it may be less about “navigating” and more about finding an environment that aligns accountability with decision rights. Influence is great, but influence without authority eventually burns people out.
The unfiltered truth
The truth is: design doesn’t succeed or fail in isolation. Outcomes are shared. Holding design accountable without granting authority isn’t just unfair, it’s structurally unsound. We need to stop romanticizing design’s “influence” and start calling the structural imbalance what it is. Until accountability and authority match, design will always be set up as both the safety net and the fallback.
About Design Unfiltered
This series is my “design gets real” space where I share the messy truths about design and design leadership that don’t usually make it into case studies or conference decks. Think of it as tales from the trenches: unpolished, candid, useful solutions to frustrating problems, and hopefully even a bit cathartic if you’re a designer or leader navigating the same challenges.
