Among our early hypotheses on the future of design executive roles, we’ve been closely tracking how our members’ scopes of responsibility have evolved across 2023–2025. 

What we heard at the Annual Summit 2025 both confirmed and expanded this view: when design leadership is delivered with enterprise effectiveness, credibility, and sustained business impact, its value extends into broader areas of enterprise responsibility.

In practice, this shows up in two ways.

For some, core roles such as VP of Design and Chief Design Officer are expanding in scope — encompassing not only product development but also enterprise-level strategic research, foresight, vision and culture, and customer success.

For others, this growth is opening career pathways into roles such as VP of Customer Experience, Chief Experience Officer, VP of Product Experience, and VP of Digital Experience.

Both paths reflect the same shift: when done well, businesses see and benefit from leaders charged with strategic oversight of experience strategy, grounded in a design-led approach, along with the transformation and change management required to realize it. Design executives are being entrusted with wider influence, either through an expanded CDO remit or by stepping into new enterprise roles.

That said, this evolution is not universal. Role expansion varies by industry, enterprise maturity, and the credibility of the individual executive. Yet when these conditions align, design leaders demonstrate how strategic design can become a trusted force well beyond its original function.

To arrive at this insight, senior design executives from the world’s most influential companies gathered September 25–27, 2025 in Silicon Valley for the Design Executive Council Annual Summit. Over three days, members explored how design executive roles are being reimagined and what it means to lead global businesses in an era defined by AI breakthroughs, market volatility, and pressures to reinvent, grow, and improve efficiency.

The theme, Defining Futures, Reimagining Roles, anchored the Summit’s arc of inquiry:

• Day 1: Members surfaced shared business scenarios and leadership imperatives, framing bold provocations and aligning on the most urgent questions for enterprise leadership today.
  
• Day 2: Dialogue moved into four deep-dive tracks:
  
  • Vision: Creating conditions for values and purpose that guide enterprise transformation.
  • Business Strategy: Contributing to top-line growth and bottom-line efficiency.
  • Product Development: Rethinking who builds, how products are delivered, and how to sustain quality at scale in the AI era.
  • People & Culture:  Embedding human-centered principles into leadership and organizational practices amid disruption.
    
• Day 3: Members converged on the future scope of design executive roles, with ~60% indicating growth in their remit across functions like product management, engineering, analytics, and data science.

Throughout the sessions, members emphasized that design leadership isn’t defined by output volume, but by the discipline to distill what matters, ask the right questions, and ensure the work is not only done, but done well.

“The growth of our Council’s members’ scope of responsibilities reflects how strategic design leadership, when done well, has incredible power to be a trusted force well beyond design functions in the world’s largest businesses. Our forum is enabling our members to discover and share best practices that help enterprises maximize and sustain the full value of design executives.” – Gordon Ching, Founder & CEO, Design Executive Council

This gathering underscores the momentum of our mission and the expanding influence of our Council, uniting design executives across industries who are redefining how enterprises compete, innovate, and grow. The work continues, advancing our research, deepening our insights, and strengthening our collective mission to establish design leadership as an indispensable force in the enterprise.

Council members who participated in the Summit 2025: 

• Andy Vitale - VP of Head of Product Design at Taxwell
• Arin Bhowmick - EVP, Chief Design Officer at SAP 
• Brian Rice - Fmr. SVP, Global Chief Design and Brand Experience Officer at 3M
• Caleb Schmidt - SVP of Experience Design at U.S. Bank 
• Christian Rohrer - VP of Human Centered Design at TD Bank Group 
• Christina Vallery - Chief Design Officer at The Cigna Group 
• Christopher Kiley - Chief Design Officer at Boeing Digital 
• Cindy Chastain - Fmr. SVP of Customer Experience and Design at Mastercard 
• Daniela Jorge, Chief Design Officer at Capital One
• Eric Kabisch - Fmr. VP of Design at Roblox 
• Eric Wood - SVP of Product Experience at Hyundai Motor Group (42dot)
• Fabricio Dore - Chief Design Officer at Itau Unibanco 
• Heather Cassano - VP of Experience and Analytics at Autodesk 
• Heather Winkle - VP of Digital Experience at Delta Air Lines 
• Irene Au - Design Partner at Khosla Ventures
• Issa Breibish - Chief Design Officer at Bentley Systems 
• Jae Park - VP of Digital Product Design at Ford Motor Company 
• Janaki Kumar - Chief Design Officer, Global Banking at JPMorgan Chase 
• Jason Ferrell - Chief Design Officer at Humana 
• Jeff Gelfuso - SVP, Chief Design Officer at Qualtrics 
• Jennifer Darmour - VP of Health Design, Oracle
• Kaaren Hanson - VP of UX at Insulet Corporation
• Mary Piontkowski - VP of Product Design at Cisco Networking 
• Matthew Menz - VP of CX at AWS, Amazon
• Purvi Shah - VP of UX Design, Research, and Accessibility at Target
• Richard Dalton - VP, Head of Consumer Design at Verizon
• Suzanne Pellican - Fmr. VP of Ads User Experience at Google
• Tom Gebauer - SVP of Design and Research at Dow Jones

We thank our Council members for their spirted contributions and commitments to improving the state of business by advancing the role and value of strategic design leadership.

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For senior design executives interested in our Council, learn more about our Membership