The craft-vs-strategy choice is a trap.

Pick a lane is bad advice for design leaders.

I hear two versions of the same advice constantly. The first: get strategic — stop touching pixels, the team can do that. The second: stay close to the craft — strategy is a C-suite hobby, ship work. Both are wrong in their shared assumption that you have to choose.

What I see in the field: people who go all-strategy lose the team’s trust. They become the next level of leadership theater, removed from the thing they used to be good at. People who stay all-craft lose the business. Their best work doesn’t make it into the roadmap because they can’t translate the value to the people who control the roadmap.

The seam is where the work gets good. You push pixels in a working session. You also walk into a roadmap meeting and make the case. The skills aren’t orthogonal. They’re complementary to the point of being inseparable, and pretending otherwise breaks the role.

The humility part: the best version of this work happens when you’re slightly out of your depth on both sides. The strategic framing isn’t perfectly worded; the components aren’t perfectly crafted. That’s fine. Calibrated humility is what makes the seam livable — pretending to know it all is what makes it impossible.

A short version: don’t pick a lane. Pick the seam. Stay technical. Stay close. Translate.