Do you think there’s enough work being done on deign tools for design leaders - what are they?

Honestly, no. Most of the energy in design tools goes toward individual makers: helping one designer produce more screens, images, or code. Today, AI tools are mostly solo sports. Developers write more code, designers create more images, PMs crank out more docs. That's useful, but it doesn't help much with what design leaders actually do.

So what do leaders do? They establish a vision, bind their team and stakeholders to that vision, and then drive for results to make it a reality. For years, the "tools" for that job have been communication artifacts more than software: narrative, information design, visual design, and prototypes. Yes, that includes PowerPoint, which designers love to hate but which works well for framing the story behind a design. Tom Chi made a similar point years ago: if a discussion that took meeting after meeting suddenly becomes simple after 15 minutes with your diagram, you're on the right track.

The gap is getting more obvious now that anyone can build. At the Design Futures Assembly, one design leader described letting everyone build and push whatever they wanted, and you could feel it in the product because nothing made sense together. Part of the reason is that people guide agents in different ways: agent markdown files, skills files, system prompts, memory, MCP servers (connectors that give agents access to tools and data), and so on. Each person steers toward their own version of things, and perspectives drift apart faster than they used to.

That's where I think leader-focused tools need to go: shared ways of steering agents so a team ships one unified point of view instead of fifteen different ideas. Coherence, consistency, and alignment become something you can encode and distribute, not just something you present in a review.

Don't expect someone to hand you that tool, though. Leaders keep asking for the go-to stack, and the honest answer from people at the frontier is that there isn't one. The best teams run dozens of internal tools that change month to month. Designers are already building custom agents that crawl codebases and write wikis of user mental models.

So if you lead a design team, the most useful tool might be one you build yourself: a shared set of guidance that every agent on your team runs with.