Modern Skill Stack is a podcast hosted by Uxcel CEO Gene Kamenez. Real stories on how digital product professionals are keeping up with a constantly changing skills landscape.
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Most designers who move into leadership are promoted because they’re great at the craft. Then they discover the craft is almost entirely gone from their day.
Lee Jeffery has spent over 20 years designing digital products, from Dreamweaver-era websites through Figma, and has led design teams at Auto Trader and Sage, one of the UK’s largest enterprise software companies. He also holds a Level 5 coaching qualification, completed through an apprenticeship at Newcastle University. That combination of deep practitioner experience and formal coaching training gives him a unique perspective of what design leadership actually demands, and what nobody warns you about before you make the jump.
Lee is also the founder of the Natter Community in Manchester, a volunteer-led space connecting designers, technologists, and people at all career stages.
I invited Lee on because his perspective on leadership is grounded rather than aspirational. He’s not selling a framework. He’s sharing what he’s learned, including the things he got wrong.
This episode is brought to you by Uxcel.
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You’ll learn:
Why coaching skills are the real foundation of leadership
What a design lead’s actual week looks like (and what will surprise you)
How to connect your team’s work to business goals without losing them
The mistake most leaders make with high performers
How to manage your team’s anxiety about AI while staying curious yourself
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
03:23 The importance of coaching in leadership
06:08 Lead designer to design lead transition
09:41 Day-in-a-life of a design lead
14:17 Connecting design with business goals
17:58 Navigating leadership challenges
21:35 Personal growth and learning
26:32 How to handle difficult conversations
28:56 The importance of feedback
30:46 Emotional intelligence in leadership
33:57 Managing ICs
41:06 Impact of AI on design
53:35 Outro
My biggest takeaways
Coaching is not a soft add-on, but foundation of everything else
When I asked Lee what skill he’d been most focused on over the last year, he didn’t say AI. He said coaching. He’d just finished a Level 5 coaching apprenticeship at Newcastle University, and the way he talked about it, you get the sense it genuinely reoriented how he leads.
In Lee’s words:
“I’ve been able to bring coaching into leadership. Active listening and asking powerful questions — it’s helped shape me and support my team a lot more.”
Lee was careful to say coaching isn’t the right mode for every situation. Some people need mentorship, guidance, step by step. Others need someone to ask the right questions and get out of the way. Knowing which is which, and being able to move between modes fluidly, is what sets apart great leaders.
The coaching mindset also changes how he shows up in cross-functional meetings. When you’re in a room with product managers and engineers and the conversation turns technical, coaching skills such as probing questions, attentive listening, and holding back your own assumptions, become a tool for influence that goes well beyond one-to-ones.
Two different jobs, two different skill sets
A lot of designers drift into leadership without realizing they’ve entered an entirely different profession. Lee was direct about this, and about how unprepared most people are when it happens.
In Lee’s words:
“They are two different roles. When you get into leadership, there are different skills involved. You need role models to understand what leadership is and how it aligns to your values. When I got into leadership, I was always worried: do I need to be like this particular leader? But actually you just need to be authentic and be yourself — because that’s what people need.”
The anxiety he described — do I need to become someone else? — is something I think most new leaders struggle with but rarely say out loud. Lee’s answer is a practical conclusion he reached after watching how different management styles landed with different teams. You can borrow frameworks, study role models, work through books like The First 90 Days (which Lee did when he joined Sage). But the leadership that sticks is the kind that’s congruent with who you actually are.
Worth noting is that imposter syndrome doesn’t stay in one career transition. It resurfaces at almost every step from mid-level to senior, and then senior to lead. The solution isn’t to suppress it. Treat the leadership role the same way you’d treat a design problem: learn, iterate, reflect on what’s working.
A design lead’s week: multiplying through others
If you’re an IC weighing a move into leadership, the single most useful advice you can take is this: the craft largely disappears from your calendar. Not forever, not completely, but far more than most people expect.
In Lee’s words:
“The biggest shock would be how little time you spend in the tools now. You’re more of an enabler and a multiplier designing through others in a way. I really believe that one-to-one conversations are a leadership moment. You can have these transformative conversations as you’re speaking to individuals, finding out about what’s happening, how you can support them, how you might enable them and empower them.”
Lee’s week at Sage runs on one-to-ones, design critique sessions, and strategic meetings where he advocates for design at an organizational level. He’s also built two recurring rituals himself: design studio drop-ins which are informal, optional sessions meant to recreate the spontaneous collaboration of a pre-Covid open-plan office, and Friday team cooldowns, a light retro format where people can vent, celebrate small wins, or share what they’ve learned.
I like to think of these as a connective tissue, especially in remote environments where that tissue doesn’t form on its own.
The hands-on/hands-off balance varies by organization. Lee dips back into design work when someone hits a problem they can’t solve themselves, or when a strategic piece needs a vision before it can be handed off. But the important thing is that the default has shifted. He’s no longer producing, but shaping the conditions that produce the work.
The translator role: connecting design to business outcomes
One of the least visible parts of a design lead’s job is what Lee described as bridging two worlds: the team’s design goals and the organization’s commercial reality.
In Lee’s words:
“When you transition from IC to leader, it’s about connecting those two worlds. Namely, understanding the business goals and strategy, and how design can enable that. Then storytelling. Communicating it to your team so they understand where they’re going and why decisions are being made.”
This matters more than most leaders acknowledge. A designer working as an IC sees problems in the product. They have ideas. They want to work on certain things. But there are priorities, commercial commitments, and roadmap decisions made three levels above them. Without someone translating between those two realities, the team either feels ignored or loses the thread of why their work matters.
Lee stresses here that this doesn’t mean just simply relaying business decisions down the chain. It’s building a narrative that connects daily design work and company outcomes and makes them easily understood by the people doing that work. And it runs in both directions: he also described helping designers articulate the commercial value of their decisions upward, so that quality, consistency, and accessibility don’t get deprioritized.
I’d add something from my own experience: business stakeholders aren’t adversaries of good design. They’re optimizing for different variables. The design lead who learns to speak that language, and helps their team do the same, earns a seat at the table that no amount of advocacy alone will secure.
Difficult conversations don’t get easier. You just get better at preparing for them.
When I asked Lee to share something he’d handled badly with his team, he shared:
“The hardest thing I had to deal with is those difficult conversations around performance, design quality, whatever it might be. I really struggled the first times. Now I use AI as a coaching tool: if I’m going into a session and want to practice the conversation, I’ll use those tools to bounce ideas around how I might frame it. It’s really important to me that the message is delivered right.”
The instinct to avoid these conversations, or to soften them until the message evaporates, is nearly universal in leaders who really care about the people they manage. Lee cares, obviously. The coaching work helped him see that withholding honest feedback isn’t an act of kindness, but something that denies people the chance to get better.
The AI use case he described is also a clever way to tackle this problem. Not letting AI write the conversation, but using AI as a thinking partner for rehearsing framing, testing phrasing, getting clearer before you walk in. Low stakes, high-stakes prep.
One thing Lee said that I absolutely agree with is that feedback shouldn’t live only in annual reviews. It should be built into how a team actually operates: into design huddles, one-to-ones, cooldowns, so that honest conversation becomes part of the culture, not a one-off event. When that culture is functioning, no single conversation has to carry the weight of months of things left unsaid.
AI in design teams: curiosity over anxiety, experimentation over certainty
The last major stretch of our conversation was AI. I want to be accurate about where Lee stands: not a booster, not a skeptic, but someone navigating real complexity inside a large enterprise where “just adopt it” is not a viable answer.
In Lee’s words:
“There are people on the team who are embracing it, exploring and experimenting. There are people who are quite scared and nervous, or maybe they haven’t got the time. As a leader, it’s about creating opportunity and not being scared to experiment. We’ve been on this journey before. Change is constant in our profession, from the dot-com boom to responsive design. This one feels different because every month it’s changing rapidly. But the question is: how are we adopting these tools and understanding what’s available?”
Lee has been vibe coding on the side, and he’s firm that AI still needs a skilled eye. When he built a site with these tools, it generated a primary button that got overridden by CSS, creating an inconsistent style. It wasn’t flagging accessibility issues. It wasn’t thinking about SEO or microcopy. All this goes to say that professional judgment didn’t disappear, it just moved. Instead of executing in the tools, you’re now directing, critiquing, and catching what gets missed.
Teams that invest time in research depth, accessibility knowledge, and content craft are going to produce better AI-assisted outputs. The differentiator isn’t prompting skill. It’s the quality of human judgment, backed by knowledge and experience, that you bring to what comes out.
At Sage, they’re still experimenting. They run development days, make time to explore, and work through the security and licensing questions that large organizations have to answer before new tools can become standard. I’m not sure there could be a cleaner way through it, especially in complex systems. Lee says everyone is on their own learning curve, and individual contributors sometimes surface tools that leadership hasn’t seen yet, which is the reality for many product teams right now.
A note from Gene
Design leadership is one of the topics we explored a lot in Uxcel and keep coming back to partly because the gap between what people expect from it and what it actually demands is underestimated time and time again.
Lee’s framing of the role as “designing through others” is something I wish I’d encountered earlier in my own leadership journey. The first instinct for many of us when we move into leadership is to stay close to what we’re good at. But the reality is work changes and what becomes important now is the environment you create, the conversations you have, the connections you build, and the room you give people to grow.
If you’re preparing to make that transition, or you’re early in it, Uxcel has learning paths built specifically for product professionals growing into leadership from mentorship mastery through advanced cross-functional collaboration and skills.
Start at uxcel.com
Resources and tools mentioned
Books:
The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins: amazon.com/first-90-days
Frameworks & concepts:
Radical Candor (Kim Scott): radicalcandor.com
Daniel Goleman’s Six Leadership Styles: danielgoleman.info
DISC Profile: discprofile.com
Tools mentioned:
Figma: figma.com
Dovetail: dovetail.com
Where to find Lee Jeffery:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lee-jeffery
Coaching: leejefferycoaching.co.uk
Natter Community: natter.community
Production and marketing by Uxcel. Interested in appearing on the Modern Skill Stack podcast? Reach out at partnerships@uxcel.com
What’s the one thing nobody told you before you stepped into a leadership role, or that you wish someone had? Share in the comments.
Cheers,
Gene
