The Moment I Stopped Thinking Like a Designer

I was in a conference room at Nike's World Headquarters in Beaverton, presenting the latest iteration of our commerce platform. The interface work was clean. We'd spent months on information architecture, user flows, behavioral models. The work was good.

A VP stopped me halfway through.

Not to praise it. Not to critique the design itself. But to ask a question that had nothing to do with pixels or navigation or copy: "Who benefits from this being easy for users?"

I remember the silence. I remember my instinct to answer with metrics—conversion, time-on-task, task success rates. All the designer metrics. But that wasn't what she was asking.

She was asking about incentives. About who in the organization was motivated to make the product work, who stood to lose if it didn't, and whether the way we'd structured the design actually aligned with how decisions got made inside Nike. She was asking about systems.

I think that's the moment I stopped thinking like a designer.

It doesn't sound dramatic in retrospect, because it wasn't. No sudden enlightenment. No rejection of design as a discipline. If anything, it was the opposite: a recognition that design—real design—had to expand far beyond the interface. That everything I'd learned about how people think and behave applied to organizations just as much as it applied to users.

The thing about design thinking is that it's genuinely useful. Empathy, iteration, prototyping, constraint-based problem solving—these are powerful tools. But they're tools for understanding systems. And in those early years at Nike, I was pointing them almost entirely at the surface: the digital experience, the user interaction, the commerce flow.

I was optimizing the wrong level.

We'd taken user research seriously. We'd observed how Nike athletes and weekend runners actually bought shoes. We'd prototyped interfaces. We'd tested information architecture. All of that was real and necessary work. But we hadn't done the harder work: understanding the organizational system that had to support, sustain, and evolve that experience.

The infrastructure was there—engineering, operations, merchandising. But the incentive structures? The decision-making authority? The information flow between teams? The mental models people carried about what a "digital commerce experience" even meant? That was a different design problem entirely. And it was the problem that would determine whether anything we built actually lasted.

Looking back from 2026, I can see the pattern more clearly than I could then.

At Nike, I learned to design interfaces. That was the job. But the real constraint wasn't interface design—it was organizational design. Not whether users could find shoes easily, but whether the organization could move quickly enough to keep the platform relevant. Not whether the flow made sense, but whether the decision rights made sense. Not whether the interface was intuitive, but whether the shared mental model across engineering, design, merchandising, and operations was coherent.

This connects to something from the previous reflection: the idea of krama, right sequence. The Sanskrit concept that you can't scale the wrong thing without breaking it. You have to get the order right.

What I was missing was that krama isn't just about doing things in sequence. It's about recognizing what layer of the system needs designing first. You can't design the interface before you design the decision-making process. You can't optimize the digital experience before you optimize the organizational capacity to sustain it.

The VP's question was really about dharma—the rightness of the system. Who should benefit? Who should decide? What incentives actually serve the whole, not just the part? These are design questions. They're just not questions about form or interface.

This realization didn't change what I did immediately. I was still designing interfaces. I was still leading a team of researchers and designers focused on commerce experiences. But the questions I started asking shifted.

When someone proposed a new feature, I'd ask not just "Will users want this?" but "Who owns this decision? What happens if this breaks? Which team will actually maintain this?" When we'd run into friction between design and engineering, I'd look deeper—not assuming it was about ego or process, but asking what misaligned incentives or unclear mental models were creating the friction.

I started thinking about the organization as a design system.

That sounds corporate, maybe. But it's the logical extension of design thinking. If you believe that empathy and iteration and prototyping lead to better outcomes, you apply those methods everywhere. You prototype organizational structures. You iterate on decision-making processes. You build empathy across teams by making implicit systems explicit.

Seva—service, or the idea of contribution to something larger than yourself—begins to look different through this lens. It's not about being helpful in the moment. It's about building systems where helpfulness is structurally possible. Where the incentives point people toward contribution, not toward protection.

The Nike chapter was six years of learning to be a builder. Learning to translate user needs into systems. Learning to lead teams across disciplines. Learning that shipping something real is harder and more valuable than being right. Learning that design isn't about your ideas—it's about creating conditions where good ideas can emerge from anywhere.

But it also taught me that building stops at a certain scale. You can architect a beautiful product and still have it fail because the organization couldn't evolve with it. You can have the best team and still be constrained by incentive misalignment three levels up.

The realization at Nike wasn't that design thinking was wrong. It was that I'd been thinking too small. The interface was the easy part. The system that sustained the interface—the organizational design, the incentive structures, the decision-making authority, the shared mental models—that was the real design work.

When I left Nike for Microsoft in 2006, I carried this with me. The plan was to build a UX team in Hyderabad—not just execute design work, but establish standards, build organizational capacity, translate a global design discipline into a local context while respecting both.

It sounds like a tactical leadership problem. But I now understood it as a design problem. How do you design an organization and a system of work such that it's possible for good design to happen at scale? How do you create the conditions—the right incentives, the right decision-making authority, the right communication patterns—where design thinking can actually take root?

Season 2 isn't about scaling a product. It's about scaling an organizational capability.

Satya Sivunigunta is a technology executive, founder, and investor based in Phoenix, AZ. This article is part of an ongoing operating journal — retrospective reflections written in 2026 on operating roles from 2000 onward.