What Competitive Sports Taught Me About Leading Design Teams
Real lessons from the field that make creative teams faster, smarter, and stronger.
I’ve played soccer my whole life. It’s the sport that taught me how to move, how to see the field, how to work as a team. Then came ultimate frisbee — where I competed at the highest levels: a world championship, multiple U.S. national championships, and more regional tournaments than I can count. For decades, I built my life around the field — training, traveling, competing, recovering, repeating. These days, I lead design teams. And everything I know about doing that well, I learned from sports.
Turns out, the overlap is bigger than you might think.
Managing a design team feels a lot like captaining an elite sports team. You’re juggling personalities, roles, egos, energy levels, goals, and the unexpected — all while chasing something bigger than yourself. I’ve taken more from sports into my creative leadership than I ever did from management or leadership training. Here’s what I’ve learned.
Design Leaders Are Coaches, Not MVPs
I don’t need to be the star player anymore. I want to be the coach who sees the whole field, adjusts the formation, and helps the team shine. My job isn’t to design the flashiest thing — it’s to create the conditions for the team to do their best work. That means giving clear direction, honest feedback, and space to grow. Sometimes it’s putting a junior in a position to lead. Other times, it’s pulling someone aside and asking if they’re okay. Coaching is equal parts strategy and empathy.
Roles Win Games
A team of all-stars doesn’t beat a team that understands how to play their roles.
In soccer, you don’t want your defenders playing like strikers or vice versa. In ultimate, you need handlers and cutters to commit to their jobs and trust each other. Same with design. You need your researchers to own discovery, your visual designers to go deep on craft, and your content folks to shape the narrative. When everyone plays their role with confidence and awareness, the team starts to click. That’s when the magic happens.
Train Together, Not Just Ship Together
You don’t build chemistry during a tournament. You build it at practice.
In design, that means investing in non-deliverable time: design critiques, low-stakes workshops, skill shares, even goofy side projects. The best ultimate teams I played on practiced communication, timing, trust — so when game time came, we didn’t have to think, we just moved. Same in a creative sprint. When teams have trained together, they flow. Without that, you’re just seven people holding Figma files.
Strategy Beats Talent When Conditions Change
In a tournament, you never face the same opponent twice. Wind, heat, injury, sleep, adrenaline — all variables. The teams that win are the ones who adapt.
Design teams have to be just as flexible. Sometimes you need a heavy research-led approach. Other times it’s speed over polish. You might be stacked with specialists or relying on hybrids. Good design leadership isn’t about forcing the same playbook — it’s about reading the conditions and adjusting formation. That might mean rotating responsibilities, changing process cadence, or handing off the disc to someone who’s hot.
You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure
Every good team watches film. We track assists, turnovers, blocks, and touches. Not to shame, but to grow.
Creative teams should do the same. What’s our pass completion rate — aka handoff success? Where are users dropping off? What skills are underdeveloped? What habits are burning people out? Metrics should never be weaponized, but they should always be visible. The goal is to build a culture of ownership without blame. Own the win. Own the loss. Learn. Move on.
Ego Kills Flow
I’ve played on teams where everyone wanted to be the hero. We lost.
I’ve played on teams where we celebrated the assist more than the goal. We won.
Design is no different. Healthy competition is great. Sharp critique is necessary. But when ego blocks collaboration — or someone’s more focused on their personal portfolio than the project — we lose momentum. As a leader, I try to model humility and reward team-first behavior. I’m not impressed by “rockstars.” I’m impressed by designers who make the people around them better.
Burnout Is a Team Failure, Not a Personal One
Good coaches pull players off the field before they get hurt. They rotate lines. They schedule rest days.
Design leaders should do the same. Burnout isn’t about individual weakness. It’s about a system failure. If someone on my team is stretched thin, that’s on me. Whether it’s rebalancing work, adjusting timelines, or just encouraging people to take a damn break — this is part of the job.
Use Data Like a Sports Analyst
In sports, radar charts are used to assess athlete performance across skill sets. I use them with design teams too. Once a year, during annual reviews, I ask team members to rate themselves across categories like visual design, UX thinking, leadership, and business strategy. I blend those self-assessments with peer feedback and my own observations, then create radar charts — sometimes enhanced by AI — that visualize each person’s strengths and areas for growth.
It’s not just about where you are now, but where you can go next.
I use these charts in 1:1s and development sessions to track growth, set goals, and have transparent conversations. AI helps speed up the analysis and highlight patterns I might miss. I’ve even used it to guide hiring decisions by spotting gaps and mapping the ideal skill profile for new roles. The output is a holistic, data-informed view of the team — just like a coach would use for lineup decisions and training priorities.
Culture Is Built in the Locker Room
Winning teams have rituals. They trust each other. They joke together. They huddle.
Design culture isn’t built in project retros. It’s built in Slack banter, spontaneous figjams, shared playlists, and moments where you’re not trying to impress anyone. That sense of “we’ve got each other’s backs” makes everything else easier. Ultimate taught me that a team that loves playing together plays better. Design is the same. We’re not just moving pixels. We’re moving together.
The Work Is the Game
You don’t play sports to win meetings. You play to win games.
Design teams exist to make things — products, experiences, clarity. I lead with that in mind. Every kickoff is a match. Every presentation is a pass. Every release is a goal. If we’ve built trust, practiced well, adapted our tactics, and worked as a unit — we win. And even when we don’t, we get better.
I didn’t learn how to manage from a business book. I learned it under pressure, surrounded by teammates, trying to win something that mattered.
That’s how I run my teams now. Like we’re playing for something worth winning.
