I've been coaching my daughters in softball and volleyball for five seasons now. My son has been playing baseball even longer. Between the three of them, I've spent a lot of evenings on dusty infields and squeaky gym floors, learning things I had no idea I was learning.
None of those things were about sports.
They were about leadership. About feedback. About what actually makes people better at something they care about. And the more time I spent as a coach, the more I realized that everything I was figuring out on the field applied directly to the design team I was leading at work.
Here's what I've taken from the dugout to the design room.
A safe environment isn't soft. It's a performance strategy.
There's a myth in both sports and creative work that pressure produces performance. That if you keep people a little uncomfortable, a little uncertain, they'll work harder and produce better results.
In my experience, the opposite is true.
When my players know they can make a mistake without getting benched, without getting a look, without feeling like they've let everyone down, they try things. They take swings they wouldn't have taken otherwise. And yeah, sometimes they miss. But over time, the players who are willing to try and fail in practice become the ones who come through when it actually matters.
Design works exactly the same way. When someone on my team knows their first draft isn't going to be met with quiet disappointment or a passive-aggressive revision list, they bring me their real ideas. Not the safe ones. Not the ones they think I want to see. Their actual instincts, on the page, where we can actually work with them.
You can't build anything interesting on a team that's afraid to put something bad in front of you.
Practice is for feedback. Games are for playing.
This one took me a season or two to really understand.
During practice, I'm a coach. I'm watching mechanics, giving notes, stopping drills to correct a throwing motion or talk through a defensive positioning. The feedback is specific, frequent, and sometimes hard to hear. That's the job of practice and my players know it.
But once the game starts, my job completely changes. I'm not correcting anyone from the sideline. I'm not pulling a player aside mid-inning to talk about what they did wrong on the last play. During the game, I'm just there to encourage, to remind them they're ready, and to make sure they're having fun.
I had to learn to translate this to design work. There's a time for detailed critique and there's a time to let the work live in the world. Not every review needs to be a full teardown. Not every deliverable needs another round of notes before it ships. Getting the timing of feedback right is just as important as the feedback itself. Too much critique at the wrong moment doesn't make the work better. It just makes your team hesitant to show you anything.
Winning has nothing to do with your opponent.
This is the one I feel most strongly about, and it's probably the thing I say most often to my players.
Before a game, I don't spend much time talking about the other team. I don't run down their lineup or tell my players what to watch out for. What I tell them is this: if you play better today than you did last game, we win. That's it. That's the whole standard.
Some of our best "wins" have come in games we lost on the scoreboard. A player who's been scared of the ball finally tracks one down in the outfield. Someone who's been slumping makes solid contact twice. A kid who's never been confident at the plate walks up there like she belongs. That's progress and progress is the actual goal.
In design, I try to measure the same way. Did we ship something better than the last version? Did someone on the team try an approach they've never tried before? Did we solve a problem we've been stuck on for months? Those are wins, regardless of what the metrics say in the first week or what the stakeholders think in the first review.
Obsessing over competitors or chasing external benchmarks is a losing strategy in the long run. The only standard worth holding yourself to is the one you set for yourself.
The best coaches make themselves unnecessary.
The goal of coaching, if you're doing it right, is to work yourself out of the job.
I don't want my players to need me on every play. I want them to have internalized enough, practiced enough, trusted themselves enough, that when a ball comes their way in the bottom of the last inning, they don't look to me. They just play.
That's how I think about design leadership too. The best thing I can do for someone on my team isn't to have the right answer for every problem. It's to help them develop their own judgment so they eventually don't need to ask. The goal is to build designers who can run with a problem from brief to shipped without checking in at every step, not because they're unsupervised, but because they actually trust themselves.
That takes time. It takes a lot of practice-mode feedback and game-mode freedom. But when it clicks, it's the best feeling there is, in a gym or on a design team.
I didn't go into coaching thinking it would make me better at my job. I went because my kids wanted to play and I wanted to be there. But it turns out the lessons have run in both directions, and I'm not sure I could separate the coach from the design leader at this point even if I tried.
Which seems like a win to me.
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