A common critique of Agile is the lack of sponsorship from the C-Suite or adjacent functions not directly producing code. In reality, a decade of evidence shows that effective managing down significantly improves managing up. Middle-weight design management plays an essential role in supporting agile teams - even when designers do not transition into product roles.

Design communities tend to split into three groups:
5% - true Agile practitioners with lived experience of balanced, functional Agile environments.
25% - sceptics who have never experienced a healthy product organisation and view any structure as a distraction.
70% - the majority, whose interpretation of Agile varies wildly based on anecdote, past employment, or inherited habits.

Managing Up

Designers often resist agile structures (“rails”), not realising these rails are no different from a typographic grid: a foundation that supports clarity, not a constraint. Without understanding the “grid” of delivery, designers experience unnecessary tension between linear engineering workflows and interconnected design processes.

A more effective approach is dual-track reporting: two tracks, two functions, two responsibilities - aligned through Just-In-Time (JIT) decision-making. This allows teams to move faster locally without compromising organisational alignment. Delivery accelerates, and upstream visibility improves.

From Silos to Broadcast

Siloed teams protect information unnecessarily, reducing value for the wider organisation. One example: a global organisation with ~600 digital properties and ~200 CTAs across customer journeys. Standardising these CTAs once required endless meetings, competing agendas, conflicting codebases, and long deployment cycles.

Instead, our Design System team adopted a simpler model: publish and broadcast.
— A new CTA guideline was published in Confluence.
— All teams were invited to submit required variations.
— Feedback was categorised into low, medium, and high impact.
— A design architect mapped changes across the ecosystem.
— Development cycles were aligned.
— Within six months, 3.7 million CTAs were replaced across the entire organisation - without a single additional meeting.

This was achieved with a self-managed team of:
— Two design system architects
— One brand expert
— Two production designers
— One design director

No PM, no CPO, no CSM - yet full alignment, automated reporting, and transparent documentation supporting almost 1,000 employees weekly.

The Only Way Is Up

This example demonstrates the power of self-management, shared purpose, and distributed expertise. When teams broadcast knowledge rather than protect it, scale becomes achievable - and design becomes a strategic accelerant instead of a bottleneck.