A mentor once told me, "as you move into design leadership, you never stop being a designer - it's just what you design that changes." As my career evolves, I see how true this is. As an experience designer, I was motivated to eliminate UI complications so that people could get their real work (or play!) done. As a design manager, I now must eliminate organizational complications - to smooth the path for my team to create clear, actionable, and strategic design guidance for product development and (sometimes) even organizational change. In practice, I try to bring the right people together in conversation to develop solutions that strike the magical balance of meeting business goals, technology possibilities and constraints, and most importantly, customer needs. Working partnerships with business leaders, product management, and engineering enable my team to engage across the full lifecycle of product development, from strategic direction to final execution. Customer engagement through research and co-creation, combined with creative design thinking approaches, help us tell compelling stories about our customers and how we can make their lives easier. Those stories help facilitate strategic conversations that lead us towards innovative solutions with alignment across disciplines and groups.