Sergio
Gallo.

For twenty-plus years I've worked in design, the last decade in director-level roles building and operating UX functions. The work I'm most useful for sits at the intersection of three things: regulated consumer products, multi-market product strategy, and design organisations that need to grow fast without losing their identity.

The most leveraged thing a design leader does is set the operating model, not the visual standard. Visual standards travel through design systems and craft reviews; operating models travel through how the function is structured, how it integrates with product and engineering, and what design is accountable for. Most design organisations under-invest in the second and over-invest in the first.

Research is not a separate discipline from design, it is the half of design that designers tend to skip. The companies I've worked at where research has been treated as optional are the same companies that have haemorrhaged users on critical journeys without ever quite knowing why. The single highest-leverage investment I've made in any of my recent roles has been getting research onto the same cycle as design, ideally with a tool or a partner that lets the team validate hypotheses in hours rather than weeks.

Senior people don't need to be managed; they need to be trusted with decisions and held accountable for outcomes. The designers I've hired who've gone on to lead their own teams are the ones I gave real ownership to early, with clear scope, strong context, and a backstop when things went wrong. The job of a director isn't to make every decision; it's to make the meta-decisions that let other people make good decisions confidently.

I'm at my best in environments where design has a real seat at the strategy table, where the regulatory or commercial complexity rewards genuinely senior product thinking, and where there's a willingness to invest in design as a function rather than treat it as a service. When that's the brief, I'm useful. When it isn't, I'm probably not the right fit.