Services/Fractional design leadership
You need a designleader before you canhire one.
Fractional design leadership is two jobs at once. Building the design organization you do not have yet, with the scaffolding and the process that make the work land. And holding the leadership seat while you build it, until the business direction is solid enough to hire someone permanent. It runs on a few days a month instead of a headcount, and it is built to end.
What the job actually is
Fractional is not advisory. An advisor tells you what good looks like and leaves. A fractional leader sits in the org chart, runs the one to ones, writes the reviews, and is accountable for what ships.
In practice that splits in two. The first half is construction: standing up a design function from nothing, and building the scaffolding around it, intake, a career ladder, a critique cadence, a system people trust, so that good work has somewhere to go. The second half is occupancy: filling the seat, so the team has someone to escalate to, someone writing their reviews, and someone in the room when headcount is decided. Most companies need both and can only justify hiring for one.
Recommends an operating model.
Runs it, and fixes it when it does not hold.
Reviews the work.
Is accountable for the work.
Meets the leadership team.
Meets every designer, every week.
Leaves a document.
Leaves a team, and a successor.
Is not in the org chart.
Is in the org chart, with a name and an end date.
Who this is for
Three situations, and they are far more common than the job listings suggest. All three share one thing: the work is being held up by something no individual contributor has the standing to fix.
No design leader yet
No design function yet, or a handful of designers scattered under product and engineering. There is no bar, no ladder and no process, because nobody has had the standing to build one.
Between leaders
The last one left. A director search runs six months on a good day, and a team cannot hold its breath that long without losing the people you most want to keep.
A leader who needs cover
A VP with a new surface, an acquisition to absorb, or a system rebuild, and no honest way to run it alongside the job they already have.
The first ninety days
The shape is the same every time, because the diagnosis has to come before the prescription and most engagements skip straight to the prescription.
Listen
Every designer, every partner PM and engineering lead, and a read of the last two quarters of shipped work. The output is a written diagnosis, and the team sees it before the executives do.
Fix the floor
The two or three things stopping good work from shipping. It is almost always intake, decision rights, or a design system nobody trusts enough to use.
Hand it over
Rituals that run without me, a levelling framework the team can actually read, and a hiring bar written down. If none of it survives my leaving, it was theatre.
What is included
Everything a full-time design leader does, minus the parts that need a badge and a laptop from your IT department.
Team and craft
One to ones, career frameworks, levelling, performance reviews, and holding the craft bar when a deadline is arguing against it.
Hiring
Role definition, scorecards, portfolio review, interview loop design, and closing the candidate once you have found them.
Operating model
Intake and triage, decision rights, the critique and review cadence, and design input on the roadmap early enough to matter.
Design system
Governance, the contribution path, adoption, and the argument for funding it in front of people who see it as overhead.
The leadership surface
Executive readouts, headcount cases, and the cross functional negotiation that happens well before any of it reaches a designer.
Handover
Written playbooks, a successor profile, and a team that does not fall over on the last day.
How it runs
A few days a month, on your calendar and in your tools. Not a deck at the end of a quarter.
In your tools
Your Slack, your Figma, your tracker. No parallel workspace that only the consultant reads.
In your rituals
Crit, review, staffing, and the leadership meeting where the real decisions actually get made.
One written update
Monthly, in public, covering what moved and what did not. No status theatre.
A named end date
Agreed at the start and revisited each quarter. Renewal is a decision, not a default.
I hire the person who replaces me
Someone has to take the seat after me, and finding them is part of the work rather than a separate project you inherit on the last day. By the time we run the search I have been doing the job for months, so the role gets written from the organization as it actually is, not from a template.
Defining the role
Written from the org as it stands by then. Level, scope, reporting line and the three things this person has to be good at, argued rather than copied from a ladder document.
Sourcing
From a design network built over twenty six years in Silicon Valley, across Apple, Google, Airbnb, Sony, Splunk and Reddit. The leaders worth hiring are rarely on the market, and they answer people they already know.
The loop
Scorecards, portfolio review, and an interview panel your team can run again on its own after I have gone. The bar outlives the search.
The handover
I brief them, walk them through what was built and why, and then leave. The measure of the engagement is that nothing breaks when I do.
What it is not
Worth saying out loud, because the category has earned some of its reputation.
Not a deck.
The output is a team that works, not a document about one.
Not a staffing agency.
One person, named, in the room. Nobody gets swapped out halfway through.
Not permanent.
If the engagement has not made itself unnecessary, it has failed.
Not a substitute for the hire.
It buys the time and the clarity to make the right one, and usually writes the job description.
The first conversation is free.
An hour, and no pitch in it. I want to understand what is actually slowing your design team down, and whether I am the right person to help. Often the honest answer is that you need a full time hire rather than me, and I would rather say so in the first hour than in the third month.
Before
Send me a rough picture: how many designers, who they report to, and what is not working. Two paragraphs is plenty. No brief required.
The call
An hour, mostly me asking questions. By the end we should both know whether there is a real engagement here, or whether there is not.
After
A short written read-back of what I heard and what I would do first. Yours to keep and use, whether or not we ever work together.