Episode 6

Hello and welcome to Design Leadership Insights, a podcast where I share the real stories, strategies, and lessons learned from building and leading design teams. I'm Paul and I've spent the last 15 plus years navigating the complex world of design leadership.

Have you ever had a senior executive look at your simplified design and ask, "Where did all our features go?" I faced this exact situation when presenting our redesigned enterprise dashboard to our Chief Product Officer. After weeks of careful design work, I was confident we'd solved the usability issues plaguing our platform, only to watch his expression shift from interest to concern.

"This looks beautiful," he said, "but we're competing with systems that offer twice the functionality. Our sales team will crucify me if I approve this."

In that moment, I realized I had fallen into a classic leadership trap – optimizing for one stakeholder group while neglecting another. As design leaders, we constantly navigate the tension between simplicity and functionality, between what users want and what the business needs. The conventional wisdom telling us "simplicity is key" sounds great in theory, but how do you lead your team through this complexity paradox in enterprise environments?

Today, I'm sharing how I guided my team to implement progressive disclosure strategies that transformed our dashboard experience – and more importantly, how we brought stakeholders along on that journey.

As a design leader in the logistics sector, I inherited a team that was caught between competing forces. Our enterprise software had evolved over years, with each release adding new features but creating increasingly overwhelming interfaces. You've likely seen this pattern – interfaces packed with buttons, fields, and options catering to every possible use case.

My challenge wasn't just a design problem; it was a leadership problem requiring careful navigation of conflicting stakeholder needs.

On one side, our business teams and product managers pushed for additional features to match competitor offerings. Each department advocated for their priority functions to have dashboard prominence. The sales team needed differentiating features visible for demos. Marketing wanted our unique capabilities front and center. Engineering had concerns about maintaining parallel interfaces.

On the other side, our research revealed users were completely overwhelmed. In usability testing, participants struggled to complete basic tasks, often missing critical functions buried within cluttered screens. Support tickets related to "can't find feature X" had increased 40% year-over-year.

In my first cross-functional leadership meeting, I realized how entrenched these positions had become. The head of product flatly stated, "Users will learn our interface if the functionality is there," while our customer success lead countered with stories of frustrated customers threatening to leave the platform.

My team was caught in the crossfire, designing for conflicting requirements and watching their work get rejected by one side or the other. Many had adopted a resigned "just tell us what to build" attitude after multiple failed attempts to improve the experience.

This tension between simplicity and functionality isn't unique to one company – it represents an inherent leadership challenge in enterprise design. As a design leader, my job wasn't just to solve a UI problem; it was to align stakeholders around a unified approach that could satisfy these seemingly competing needs.

Rather than forcing my team to choose sides in this debate, I introduced progressive disclosure as our guiding principle. This wasn't just a UI pattern – it would become our strategic approach to navigating stakeholder tensions and delivering an experience that worked for everyone.

I first needed to build alignment around this approach. I organized a workshop with key stakeholders from product, engineering, sales, and customer success. Instead of presenting it as a design technique, I framed progressive disclosure as a business strategy for balancing competing priorities.

"What if we could maintain all the functionality that sales and marketing need while delivering the simplicity our users are demanding?" I asked the room. "What if, instead of removing features, we present them at the right moment in the user's journey?"

This reframing immediately changed the conversation. The head of sales, who had been one of the most vocal opponents of simplification, became intrigued. "So we're not losing anything – we're just organizing it differently?" he asked. This was my opening to build consensus.

I needed to demonstrate this concept tangibly, so I worked closely with two senior designers to develop an interactive prototype showcasing three levels of disclosure:

First, essential functions: Always visible, representing the core actions most users need daily.

Second, secondary functions: Available through a single interaction, serving specific use cases without cluttering the main interface.

Third, advanced capabilities: Accessible through dedicated modes for power users without intimidating newcomers.

When we reconvened with stakeholders, this prototype shifted the conversation from abstract disagreement to productive collaboration. The sales team immediately identified how they could showcase advanced features during demos without overwhelming new users. Customer success saw how this would reduce support tickets while maintaining functionality.

With conceptual alignment established, the next leadership challenge was guiding my design team to implement this approach consistently. Many had never worked with progressive disclosure at this scale. I organized a three-part training series, bringing in examples from other enterprise systems and running collaborative exercises to apply these patterns to our specific challenges.

One designer, who had been particularly frustrated by the conflicting requirements, initially pushed back: "This feels like we're just hiding the complexity rather than solving it." This became an important teaching moment for the entire team.

"We're not hiding complexity," I explained. "We're revealing it progressively, when it's relevant and valuable to the user. Our job isn't to eliminate complexity entirely – it's to make it manageable."

To operationalize this approach, I restructured our design critique process. Instead of evaluating interfaces as static screens, we reviewed them across different disclosure states, user types, and scenarios. This fundamentally changed how the team thought about their work.

Collaborating with engineering presented its own leadership challenges. Our technical lead expressed valid concerns about performance and maintainability. "Loading all these conditional states and managing when to show what – that's going to add significant complexity to the codebase," he explained during our planning session.

Rather than pushing forward regardless, I facilitated a collaborative solution-finding workshop with design and engineering. Together, we developed implementation approaches that balanced user experience with technical considerations:

For performance, we created a hybrid loading strategy where essential features loaded immediately while secondary features loaded asynchronously.

For state management, we developed consistent patterns for maintaining context when moving between different disclosure levels.

For responsive design, we established clear guidelines for how progressive disclosure adapted across device sizes.

This collaborative approach transformed what could have been a design-vs-engineering conflict into a partnership. The engineering team became advocates for the approach because they helped shape its implementation.

As we moved into development, I established regular cross-functional check-ins to maintain alignment. These sessions weren't just about progress updates – they were opportunities to showcase how progressive disclosure was addressing each stakeholder's concerns. We demonstrated how the sales team could now effectively showcase advanced features, how users could grow into more complex functionality over time, and how we were maintaining all the capabilities that differentiated us from competitors.

During implementation, we encountered an unexpected leadership challenge. Some product managers began requesting exceptions to our carefully designed system, wanting their features to have greater prominence regardless of usage patterns. This is where clear principles became essential.

I developed a decision framework that the team could use to evaluate these requests consistently. Rather than making each decision a special case, we established criteria based on usage frequency, business impact, and user need. This empowered my team to make principled decisions without constantly escalating to leadership.

After implementing this approach, we measured impact across multiple dimensions – not just interface metrics, but also business outcomes and team effectiveness.

The product metrics were compelling: onboarding time for new users reduced by 40%, task completion rates improved by 35%, and user satisfaction scores rose from 3.2 to 4.4 out of 5.

But what really validated our approach were the business results: advanced feature usage increased by 20%, sales demo-to-close rates improved by 15%, and support tickets related to interface confusion dropped by 28%.

Beyond the numbers, this project transformed how our cross-functional teams worked together. What began as a contentious design challenge became a model for how we could address competing priorities through thoughtful leadership and collaborative problem-solving.

For design leaders facing similar challenges, here are the key takeaways from our experience:

First, reframe technical design approaches as business strategies. When I introduced progressive disclosure as a way to balance competing business needs rather than just a design pattern, stakeholder resistance transformed into engagement.

Second, invest in building shared understanding. The time we spent in workshops and collaborative sessions wasn't a delay – it was essential to creating alignment that prevented much larger delays down the road.

Third, develop clear principles and decision frameworks. These empower your team to make consistent decisions without constant escalation, maintaining system integrity while building their confidence.

Fourth, measure success across multiple dimensions. By tracking metrics that mattered to different stakeholders – from user experience to business outcomes – we demonstrated value in terms that resonated with each group.

Finally, recognize that enterprise design leadership isn't about choosing between simplicity and complexity – it's about orchestrating when and how complexity is revealed. As I told my team, "Our job isn't to make everything simple; it's to make complexity manageable."

The enterprise UX challenge requires design leaders who can navigate competing priorities, align diverse stakeholders, and guide their teams to solutions that serve multiple needs. By approaching progressive disclosure as both a design strategy and a leadership framework, we transformed an apparently unsolvable conflict into an approach that served everyone better.

In the end, I didn't have to choose between less and more, or between user needs and business requirements. Through thoughtful leadership, we delivered less first, then more when needed – proving that in enterprise design, the best leaders know when less is more, and when it isn't.

In next week's episode, we'll explore "Design Leadership as a Bridge." I'll share how I've learned to unite user needs with business objectives rather than treating them as opposing forces. You'll hear practical techniques for translating between different stakeholder perspectives, creating frameworks that unify seemingly conflicting priorities, and positioning yourself as a strategic bridge-builder in your organization. Join me as we discover how the most influential design leaders don't choose sides – they build connections that transform organizations.

Thank you for listening to Design Leadership Insights. If you'd like to get in touch, please email info at design leadership insights dot co