When you can design and engineer, the temptation is to keep doing both at full intensity. The work scales. Your hours do not. Design leadership is the shift from producing artefacts to producing clarity, for engineers, researchers, and the people who will live with the product.

What actually changes

You still need taste. You still need to sit in Figma. But the higher-leverage moves are a shared language with engineering, a system that survives handoff, and a research loop that does not collapse when you leave the room.

This is the same lesson I keep relearning across Yeah, Pebla, and research at CMU-Africa: the job is to make the next decision obvious for someone who is not you.