So you want to be a strategist? I'm not sure it means what you think it means!
I meet a lot of designers who say something like, “I’m okay at UI design, but what I really want to be doing is strategy.”
I get it. In large organisations with mature design systems, visual and interaction design can start to feel like assembling someone else’s product from pre-approved parts. It’s easy to crave something higher up the food chain — a seat in those mysterious meetings where “strategy” supposedly happens.
At the same time, many of these designers have no interest in management. That’s just politics and people problems, right? So they imagine a role where they can sit around thinking big thoughts about the future, unencumbered by the messiness of delivery or organisational compromise.
But where exactly do these pure “strategy” jobs live?
Have you ever met someone whose sole job is to dream up product strategies, without ever having to deliver them? Is there some hidden basement where all this magical thinking happens, cut off from the rest of the organisation?
The closest thing most companies have to a digital strategist is their Chief Product Officer. But most CPOs aren’t trained strategists. They’re not locked away writing ten-year plans or beautifully formatted decks. Their skill lies elsewhere — in reading the business tea leaves, spotting faint market signals before anyone else does, and pushing half-formed ideas through layers of corporate resistance (of which design is often one).
The problem is, to become a CPO you’re usually expected to have been a Product Manager. And despite the narrative that PMs are deeply strategic, about 90% of their job involves writing PRDs and tickets, chasing updates from design and engineering, and firefighting cross-team stand-offs. It’s maybe 10% strategy and 90% project triage.
So when designers talk about “moving into strategy,” what they often mean is skipping straight to the CPO role — without the ten-year slog through Jira hell. But very few companies are parachuting a staff designer who’s shown a strong dislike for “politics” into such a critical hot seat.
The truth is that strategy rarely arrives as a fully-formed plan. It emerges — through hallway conversations, leadership hunches, opportunistic bets, and the sheer force of will of a few persistent individuals.
Unless you’re working at a large consultancy with “analyst” in your title, strategy is rarely anyone’s full-time job. Hell, it’s rarely anyone’s formal job at all. It’s squeezed into the gaps in your schedule — an hour at the end of the year to prep for the big all-hands, or a few late nights trying to manoeuvre your pet idea onto a crowded roadmap before it gets deprioritised or crushed.
That’s what strategy really is in most companies. Not some isolated hero’s journey, but the work you manage to do between everything else.