Your Organisation Is Missing a Function

Every company has Marketing to position products, Project Management to hit deadlines, and Engineering to orchestrate delivery.

Yet, the same patterns emerge:

Product Symptoms:

• Disconnected Customer-facing experience: Products, services, and brand feel like they come from different companies

• Product Strategy by Committee: Product direction is split between Sales / Marketing, Product, and Design, replacing clear direction with internal friction

• Feature Stacking: Teams build complexity instead of value because they lack a “North Star”

• Wasted R&D: Research departments burn millions on advanced tech that never translates into market-defining innovation

No single function owns the coherence of the product vision. This is a vision ownership problem: the Product Vision Gap.

Organisational Symptoms:

• Scaling Friction: Growth creates organisational chaos instead of smooth expansion

• Cultural Lag: Talent expectations and tools evolve faster than the company structure can adapt

• Failed Transformations: Change programmes run their course but leave the underlying culture untouched

No function provides tools for HR or CEOs to build a systemic view of how decisions get made and how members actually interact. This is a visibility problem: the Organisational Vision Gap.

The Vision Gap

This is the Vision Gap: the absence of capability to maintain clear product direction and/or to evolve how the organisation operates.

Executive Design fills this vision gap.

Why is this more critical than ever?

AI is doing to execution what industrialisation did to manufacturing. As AI accelerates technical execution, it exposes every company gap.

• If your product vision is blurry, you will explore more dead ends, faster.

• If your organisation has friction, you will spend more time debating than delivering.

The companies that win will be the clearest about what to build and the leanest in how they organise.

Why Design Should Be The Answer (And Why It Isn’t)

Historically, Design was a strategic capability, not a cosmetic one. At companies like Braun and Apple, leaders like Dieter Rams and Jony Ive didn’t just style products; they shaped business strategy. They filled the Vision Gap.

But these are rare exceptions. In most companies, Design has lost its seat at the table. Here is why your current Design organisation cannot fill the gap:

Fragmentation

Design split into silos: Industrial Design, UX, Research, and Brand Design grew apart, with different leaders, budgets, and languages. Meanwhile, Product teams emerged as a separate power centre, competing for the same strategic territory.

The Result: You cannot fill a strategic gap with fragmented disciplines. Vision requires one voice, not a chorus of conflicting specialists.

Subordination (The Service Bureau Model)

Design accepted a tactical role, becoming a service provider to the rest of the business.

• UX became “polish and refine”

• Research became “validate our assumptions”

• Industrial Design became “make the enclosure look good”

The Result: Tactical work doesn’t create vision. It executes someone else’s.

The Trust Deficit

Executives stopped trusting designers with strategy because designers stopped speaking business. When teams focus on craft instead of outcomes, or “blue sky” concepts detached from revenue, executives treat them as:

• Executors to polish ideas once the decisions are made

• Dreamers disconnected from commercial reality

• Specialists speaking incomprehensible jargon

You cannot fill a vision gap with people you don’t trust with strategy.

Design doesn’t need another “craft movement.” It needs a complete reset of its leadership approach. This is the Executive Design Movement.

How Executive Design Fills the Vision Gap

Executive Design refounds design as a C-level discipline. The refounded Design function owns vision systems, filling both the product vision gap and the organisational vision gap. It sits alongside Engineering, Marketing, and Project Management.

Note: This structure applies from the scale-up stage onwards. Before this stage, the function will be covered by a Non-Executive Director or Advisor.

The Design function has a dual mandate:

Product Vision

The Design function owns product desirability across the full customer journey. It works in balanced triad with Engineering (feasibility and technology) and Marketing (market insight and commercial viability), with Project Management orchestrating delivery.

The function drives two project types:

• Evolutionary projects: Modernising existing portfolios with clear, waste-free direction grounded in user value, the lean approach applied at McLaren and Lotus

• Revolutionary projects: Creating market disruption by combining user foresight & research (data) and design, systematising the approach that enabled products like the iPhone

Organisational Vision

The Design function applies the same research and design rigour to both products and organisation. While HR and the CEO set cultural direction, Design reveals how work actually flows, beyond formal org charts and documented processes.

It drives two project streams:

• Company Efficiency: Treating employees as “users” of internal processes to design out friction

• Company Transformation: Visualising how work actually happens across the organisation, giving the CEO evidence-based insight for transformation decisions

What Unites Under the Design Function

To deliver this mandate, the function integrates three specific capabilities:

1. Core Expertise (Design & Human Factors)

Unifying Industrial Design, Experience Design (incl. UX and its variants), and Human Factors (physical and cognitive ergonomics, user research, foresight) under one strategic voice. This ends the fragmentation that dilutes vision.

2. Delivery Management (Reclaiming the Product Role)

Product Management exists because Design failed to lead. But this created deeper problems: a conflict of interest that extends beyond just Design. Product Management also absorbs Project Management’s orchestration role. Now, the same function that defines vision also controls prioritisation, removing the neutral arbitration that good governance requires.

Executive Design corrects both anomalies.

The Shift: Product Owners are repositioned within the Design function as Delivery Facilitators, interfacing directly with Project Management, Engineering, and Marketing : the identical setup applied at Lotus. Project Management is restored to its neutral orchestration role.

The Benefit: It creates a unified centre around the product while preserving the balance of power that effective governance requires.

3. Rapid Prototyping (The Reality Anchor)

This function anchors design in reality rather than blue sky concepts. I implemented this approach in Design Innovation before it became a trend; now leading institutions like the Royal College of Art are developing this approach in their programmes. AI will accelerate this shift further.

The Capability: Clay modelling, 3D printing, XR, and AI-generated code.

The Rule: Vision must be tangible. By prototyping early and often, we anchor the vision in engineering and commercial reality.

Leadership Profile

This function is led by a Chief Design Officer who orchestrates these disciplines. Crucially, this leader must prioritise influence over craft, understanding business processes and engineering constraints as deeply as they understand design. Design craft alone is not enough.

For detailed implementation guidance on Design function structure, project types, and governance, see our companion article: “How the Refounded Design Function Works.” (available soon)

Proof: Vision Gaps Filled With Lean Resources

I’ve spent my career filling Vision Gaps, consistently delivering market-leading results with a fraction of typical resources.

My background combines Industrial Design and Systems Engineering. This rare combination enables me to think in systems while maintaining strategic vision, bridging the gap between business processes, engineering constraints, and organisational patterns in ways traditional designers cannot.

Case Study 1: McLaren Automotive

The Challenge: Align executives on strategic direction and deliver UI coherence across the entire portfolio.

The Approach: Direct C-level access allowed me to function as a strategic partner, not just a service provider.

The Result:

• Lean Execution: Achieved portfolio-wide coherence with 1/20th of typical industry resources

• Longevity: Established the UI vision deployed on the Senna GTR, GT, Speedtail, and Artura. That vision is still running in vehicles six years later (subsequently reused on GTS, Elva, 750S, and W1)

Why It Worked: Clear vision at the executive level eliminated the “vision gap.” Stakeholders aligned around a defined direction rather than shifting priorities. Direction eliminates waste.

Case Study 2: Lotus Cars

The Challenge: Founded the first HMI team to create the Emira HMI vision from scratch.

The Approach: I implemented the Executive Design structure defined in this manifesto. I positioned Product Owners as Delivery Facilitators inside the design function, interfacing with sales, marketing, and engineering rather than gatekeeping between them.

The Result:

• Internal Win: Won competitive selection against an established Geely HMI studio that had 4x our resources

• Market Win: Outperformed Volkswagen’s infotainment in external expert evaluations, again, with 1/20th of the typical resources

Why It Worked: This proved the core principle of Executive Design: Seamless integration beats resource advantages. By removing the friction between “Product” and “Design,” stakeholder conviction replaced internal politics, and the team moved faster than better-funded competitors.

Why It Translates (The Stress Test)

Scale-up automotive is the ultimate stress test. You're working across software, hardware, brand, and services; some features updatable, others locked to hardware. Some features are safety-critical, others legislative, others pure entertainment.

The product is scrutinised not just by customers but by media, where launch failures create lasting damage to sales and reputation. Vision failures cost hundreds of millions.

If Executive Design works here, it works anywhere.