Should You Meet Your Heroes?

I thought I was choosing a role. Looking back, I was also choosing an ending.

An organisation that had helped shape my creative life was offering me the opportunity to contribute to its future. After years of building a career, moving countries and rebuilding after serious illness, that invitation carried a meaning beyond the job itself.

I wanted it to be the chapter where things came together.

That hope mattered. It also affected my judgement.

The story I brought with me

In Full Circle, I wrote about returning to a city I had left after a frightening health diagnosis, and the life I had rebuilt in between.

Coming back brought a sense of unfinished business. I had more experience, a different understanding of leadership and a deeper appreciation of what it takes to begin again.

The opportunity added another layer to that return.

Long before I worked there, the organisation’s tools had helped me edit family photographs, create montages, exhibit work and explore moving images. They were part of how I learned to make things, and how I discovered what I could do.

I associated the company with possibility.

So I arrived hoping for a renewed connection to craft, peers who would stretch my thinking, and the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to the product and the people building it.

I also hoped it would validate something. The moves. The risks. The years spent recovering momentum.

A job can carry a surprising amount of emotional weight before you have done a single day’s work.

What I got wrong

I had spent enough time leading design to understand that a role depends on the conditions around it.

Its remit. Its relationships. The decisions you can influence. Whether your partners understand why you are there and want to work with what you bring.

I knew those things mattered.

But I allowed my admiration for the organisation to give me confidence about things I still needed to understand.

The quality of its products, and their significance in my life, became part of how I imagined the experience of working there. I expected a place that had helped me grow as a maker to offer the conditions in which I could contribute as a leader.

That connection made emotional sense. It wasn’t sufficient evidence.

I wanted the opportunity to work, and that desire influenced how I assessed it.

This is the part I find most useful to examine now. Experience had given me better questions. It hadn’t made me immune to wanting a particular answer.

When the role couldn’t carry the story

The reality was harder than I had imagined.

The role and the conditions around it didn’t fit in the way I had hoped. I felt isolated, with less room to contribute through the kind of leadership I wanted to bring. Increasingly, my energy went into trying to make the setup work.

I sought clarity and explored whether another role might create a better fit. Eventually, I had to recognise that the arrangement wasn’t sustainable for me.

Leaving meant letting go of more than a position. It meant accepting that the chapter I had imagined wasn’t going to happen in the way I wanted.

I can still appreciate what the organisation contributed to my creative life. I can also acknowledge that my experience working there disappointed me.

One doesn’t cancel the other.

And taking responsibility for my assumptions doesn’t mean every difficulty was mine to solve. A working relationship needs effort and willingness on both sides.

Collaboration has to change something

The experience made me more precise about what I need from collaboration.

I want to understand whether we can shape the problem together. Whether we can question a direction while there is still time to change it. Whether someone’s expertise can influence the decision, rather than simply inform how it is carried out.

These are practical questions. They reveal more than a statement about valuing design ever could.

When a content designer identifies that a confusing workflow begins with the way the problem has been explained, can the team reconsider the workflow? When research challenges an assumption behind the roadmap, is there room to respond? When a design leader sees a recurring problem across teams, can they help change the conditions producing it?

Those are the moments where collaboration becomes consequential.

I have responsibilities in that relationship too. I need to make my reasoning clear, understand my partners’ constraints and remain willing to change my mind.

What I now look for is reciprocity: people who want their thinking improved by the people around them.

Giving expertise somewhere to go

I’ve also become clearer about leverage.

To me, design leadership creates the conditions for people’s expertise to improve product decisions, and builds practices that make those improvements repeatable.

That connects the three areas I keep returning to: people, practice and strategy.

People bring judgement and capability. Practice helps that capability travel across a team. Strategy gives it a direction and a reason to matter.

If someone’s contribution is limited to what they can personally produce, we leave much of their experience unused. Their greater value may be in helping others frame a problem, recognise a pattern or make a better decision.

That changes what I expect of the people I work with. I want shared ownership, constructive challenge and clarity about who decides. I want us to seek each other’s expertise early enough for it to matter.

It also changes what I owe my team.

If I recruit someone for their judgement, I need to give them decisions in which to exercise it. If I ask for challenge, I need to show that disagreement can change my thinking.

A leader’s willingness to be influenced is part of what makes a team’s expertise useful.

Putting the learning to work

At Multiplier, these ideas influence the practice I’m trying to build across product design, content and research.

One way that learning shows up is in my emphasis on problem framing and product reviews. I want us to examine what we are trying to achieve, the assumptions we are making and the evidence we have, while there is still room to shape the work.

A review is useful when it helps a team make a better decision. Its value depends on what happens afterwards.

The design system offers another opportunity for leverage. A well-considered decision about accessibility, interaction or content can improve work across many teams. But that benefit depends on adoption, ownership and the ability to keep learning from use.

The same question applies as we establish research practice and introduce AI agents: does this help people exercise better judgement, and does that judgement have a path into the product?

I’m still working through these questions. Creating a framework or a tool doesn’t guarantee the behaviour around it. Capacity, trust and decision rights require continued attention.

That keeps me honest. I can have a clear philosophy and still find its application difficult.

The experience I had hoped would validate my leadership has instead made me more deliberate about practising it—and more aware of the gap between what I intend and what others experience.

A different kind of full circle

So, should you meet your heroes?

I think there is value in it. Meeting them can reveal the fallibility of what we’ve put on a pedestal, including the assumptions we made while looking up.

It can also help us distinguish what we admire from what we need.

I had imagined coming full circle would feel like arrival. Instead, it gave me a clearer understanding of the conditions in which I can contribute, and the responsibility I have to create those conditions for others.

I don’t want to lose the capacity to admire or to hope. I do want to examine more carefully what I’m asking an opportunity to mean.

And when someone joins my team, bringing their own history and expectations, I want to remember that they are placing trust in more than a job description.

They are trusting that what they bring will have somewhere to go.

Before your next role—or your next hire—ask: what are you assuming, what have you actually established, and how will you make room for the expertise you say you value?