The hero narrative
Our industry loves a hero. The lone genius who ships a breakthrough interface. The designer who "just gets it" and produces pixel-perfect work at inhuman speed. We have borrowed the "10x engineer" myth and applied it to design, and it is doing real damage.
I have hired and managed designers for years. I have never once seen a 10x designer. I have seen 10x teams.
What the myth gets wrong
The 10x designer narrative assumes that design quality scales with individual talent. It does not. Here is what actually scales:
- Shared context. A designer who deeply understands the problem space will outperform a "better" designer who is parachuting in. Context is not transferable through a brief.
- Psychological safety. The best design work I have seen came from teams where people could say "this is not working" without fear. That is a culture outcome, not a hiring outcome.
- Tight feedback loops. A good designer with fast access to users and engineers will produce better work than a great designer working in isolation.
The uncomfortable truth: if your design output is mediocre, the problem is almost certainly your system, not your people.
The damage of the myth
When leaders believe in the 10x designer, they make predictable mistakes:
- Over-indexing on portfolios during hiring. They chase visual polish instead of evaluating how someone thinks through problems, handles ambiguity, and collaborates under pressure.
- Under-investing in team structure. Why build a thoughtful design org when you can just hire a "rockstar"?
- Creating single points of failure. The hero designer becomes a bottleneck. When they leave — and they always leave — the team collapses.
What actually works
The teams I have seen produce exceptional design share common traits:
- They have clear ownership but shared accountability
- They document decisions, not just deliverables
- They treat critique as craft, not as conflict
- They invest in onboarding and context-sharing as much as in tools
You do not need a 10x designer. You need a 1x team that multiplies each other.
If you are a design leader chasing unicorn hires, stop. Build the environment where good designers become great. That is the actual job.