My job is the quality of the decisions the team makes without me.

I'm on the founding team at Firstclub, heading product design. My role sits between product strategy, design leadership and execution. I work with product managers, engineers and designers to shape direction, navigate the problems nobody has framed yet, and raise the quality of what we ship — while leaving the work itself with the designer who owns it.

In practice that means four responsibilities: deciding what the team should be solving, making sure each designer has the context to solve it, getting Product and Engineering to a decision early enough that the design survives contact with it, and holding a bar on craft that doesn't depend on me reviewing every screen.

Every design manager claims they make other designers better. Almost none can point at anything outside their own company to back it. I can: four years as faculty, 20+ workshops and talks across India, and a set of topics I had to be able to teach — not just do.

It also changed how I manage. Teaching a room of students why an accessibility decision matters, or where B2B and B2C design genuinely diverge, forces you to make your own reasoning explicit. Once it's explicit you can hand it to a designer instead of handing them your answer — which is the difference between coaching and correcting.