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When building a strong team, balancing leadership and autonomy is one of the biggest challenges design leads face. Too much structure slows projects down, while too much freedom leads to chaos. So how do you build a design team that thrives independently while staying aligned with business goals?
In a recent webinar, Aiman Fakia, Lead Product Designer at limehome, shared his approach to building and maintaining healthy autonomy in his team. He talked about frameworks and tools that he uses to empower designers to take ownership while successfully collaborating across product and development teams, resulting in high-quality deliverables. In this article, we’ll break down his key insights.
Why Autonomy Matters in Design Teams
Traditional design teams often rely on top-down approval to manage projects and assign responsibilities. While this approach is structured, it can also produce bottlenecks that slow progress and suppress innovation.
When designers aren’t supported to take ownership, they hesitate to make decisions, limiting both their professional growth and the team’s efficiency. Micromanagement stifles individual creativity and ultimately delays projects.
Autonomy shifts the focus from just solving problems to actually owning them. When designers have the confidence to make informed, data-driven decisions, teams grow faster, collaborate better, and build stronger products.
Frameworks for Encouraging Designer Autonomy
Aiman introduced several strategies that have helped his team transition from a dependency-driven one to one that thrives on ownership.
Decision-Making Frameworks
For Aiman, autonomy doesn’t mean a lack of structure but creating and communicating clear decision-making guidelines so designers know when to move forward independently and when alignment is needed. At limehome, they use a structured approach to define ownership. To illustrate, designers have full control over smaller, contained decisions, such as UI details, interaction flows, and microcopy updates, whereas larger, cross-functional decisions, like major UX overhauls or feature prioritization, require alignment with product and engineering teams.
To maintain balance, they also use structured design reviews. These reviews act as a safeguard, letting designers present their logic for making certain decisions, receive feedback, and iterate efficiently without unnecessary roadblocks.
As Aiman puts it, “It’s not about controlling every decision; it’s about giving designers the confidence to own their work while ensuring alignment with the bigger picture.”
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Collaboration between design, product, and engineering teams is crucial for making sure everyone is on the same page and ensuring seamless execution. Aiman highlights that true autonomy doesn’t mean working in isolation. Instead, his approach embeds designers within the broader product development process early in product discovery and engineering sprint planning to ensure their insights shape features from the start.
Another way they practice collaboration is by encouraging direct feedback from engineers and product managers within design projects in Figma, making iteration cycles faster and more efficient.
Lastly, they host weekly cross-functional design critique sessions. Design, product, and engineering teams review ongoing work together, all pitching in their thoughts, bringing a fresh perspective to problem-solving, and reducing friction. This approach not only speeds up execution but also ensures that designers are confident in their decisions because they are built on shared knowledge across teams.
Supporting Junior Designers with a Structured Approach
Junior designers play a key role in every team but often struggle with decision-making due to a lack of experience and fear of failure. Aiman explains that autonomy should be introduced gradually, using a structured support system that allows them to grow and take more responsibility without feeling overwhelmed.
One effective method is encouraging self-critique. He does this by having junior designers explore multiple solutions and evaluate trade-offs before presenting their work. This helps them build confidence and sharpens their decision-making skills. Another key practice he suggests every junior designer adopt is grounding design decisions in data, using user research and analytics to back their choices.
“If you can’t sell it to me, you won’t be able to sell it to stakeholders. Every design decision needs to be backed by data, whether it’s user research, analytics, or usability testing. If a designer can’t confidently explain the reasoning behind their choices, then it’s not ready to move forward.”
Real-World Impact of Autonomy in Action
Aiman shared a great example of what happens once a designer feel empowered to autonomously make decisions. The early arrival feature in the Guest Hub, an essential tool for managing reservations, needed improvement. Instead of waiting for top-down direction, the designer in charge took initiative.
They started by analyzing customer support tickets to uncover common pain points, gathering real user data to understand the root of the problem. From there, they worked closely with product managers and guest experience teams to refine potential solutions. After multiple rounds of prototyping and testing, they finalized an approach that was ready for implementation.
The result ended up being a streamlined feature that reduced customer confusion and significantly cut down support tickets.
Maintaining Consistency Across Multiple Design Teams
With too much freedom in decision-making, there’s a risk of inconsistency. You can counter that with a living design system, regularly updated with clear documentation in Figma and Confluence to support evolving business needs. A great practice is regular design audits of the design system to spot inconsistencies before they become bigger issues.
Another key practice is collaborative governance. Engineers, designers, and product managers shape design standards together, ensuring they’re adopted across teams. By involving all stakeholders, product teams can keep design a shared responsibility rather than a siloed effort.
Wrapping Up
For design leads looking to build stronger, more autonomous teams, Aiman’s advice is simple:
Autonomy doesn’t mean stepping back; it means creating the right conditions for designers to take ownership with confidence. Encourage structured critiques and collaboration to provide guidance without micromanaging. Build trust by starting small, giving designers space to fail and learn, and reinforcing decisions with data. By fostering autonomy while maintaining a strong collaborative structure, design teams can scale efficiently, innovate faster, and drive meaningful product improvements.
