A glimpse inside my Principal Designer role

(it's absolutely not what you think)

One of the questions I get from designers all the time is:

“What does a Principal Designer actually do?”

And honestly — it’s not what you think it is…
Most of the work is invisible. It doesn’t look like screens or Figma files.
It looks like shaping conditions, sorting signal from noise, and quietly steering a very large ship.

And no, it’s not the same for every designer with a “Principal” in their title… this industry is a nightmare when it comes to titles, and there is no standard…

But here’s what 2025 actually looked like for me — and what the Principal level really becomes when you’re deep in it in a large, complex organisation.

1. Turning big, vague ambition into something teams can actually build

This year, I wasn’t just sketching a future vision — I was leading a team of designers to deliver it and shaping the research so we didn’t waste months chasing leadership’s “fun but doomed” ideas.

There were moments where I looked at a proposal and thought,
“Okay… we’re definitely going to need to test that before we bet the farm.”

So I got directly involved in designing the research approach — not to take over, but to make sure we were asking the questions that would surface reality instead of wishful thinking. And it worked.
A few ideas that sounded great in the exec room didn’t survive contact with actual customers — which saved us time, money, and several future headaches.

Why it mattered for me this year:
I wasn’t just clarifying the future; I was protecting the team from building the wrong one.

2. Treating organizational dysfunction like a UX problem (even though this was definitely not in my job description)

This part of my year was… not standard Principal Designer territory.

But, I had a niggling hypothesis:
if my designers were feeling the pain of misalignment and broken processes, other functions probably felt it too.

So I went and tested it.

I talked to leads across 9 different functions — anyone who’d give me 30 minutes. Patterns emerged fast. What we thought were “workflow issues” were really deeper cultural and structural problems no one had named yet.

I escalated the findings, half-expecting them to be ignored.
Instead, leadership called them the most actionable insights they’d seen all year.

And to be transparent, this wasn’t some “strategic patience” move.
I have a bias to action — for better or worse. If something is blocking my team, I’m not sitting quietly hoping someone else will fix it. I go figure out what the hell is going on.

Why it mattered for me this year:
It set out a path to unblock not just design… but pretty much everyone.

3. Leading by creating space, not taking space

In my role, I constantly need to resist the urge to jump into the file and “do it myself.”