Last week, I walked away from something most people would have taken.
A contract was on the table, good product, good people, a real problem to solve. Then they changed the ask. They needed someone full-time. The fractional model, they said, wouldn’t give them what they needed. Leadership. Authority. Presence.
They weren’t wrong about what they needed. But they were asking me to be someone I’d decided not to be anymore.
Every other time I was at this crossroads, I took the full-time path. The title, the org chart, and the stability. The work was good and I don’t regret it.
But I kept noticing the same thing: design always arrived after the fact. Either the decisions had already been made, or they were being made in rooms design wasn’t in. Either way, design was executin, not shaping.
The thing nobody says out loud is that the problem isn’t execution. The problem is never the designers. It’s the moment they’re invited in.
When design arrives late, it can only be executed well. It can ship on time, make things look good, and smooth the rough edges. But it can’t fix what it wasn’t there to influence. It can’t surface the assumption that’s quietly shaping every decision.
The most expensive design mistakes don’t happen during development. They happen before design starts.
When design is upstream, it can do what it’s actually best at: make the cost of not knowing something visible.
Research that reveals what’s actually broken. Discovery that tests assumptions before they harden. Decisions based on what’s true, not internal consensus dressed up as certainty. That’s not a design philosophy. It’s a business argument.
So I said no.
In that same conversation, the CEO told me my diagnosis had made something clear to them: they needed a full-time design leader for that team. I was glad it helped — just not in the way either of us had originally imagined.
The fractional model lets me be there in the moment that matters most, before decisions are locked in. I come in, diagnose what’s actually broken, run the research that reveals it, and help build the conditions for design to lead. Then the team carries it forward.
That’s the work I want to do. That’s why I chose this.
This time, I’m insisting on it.
If you’re a founder, CPO, or CTO building a product where design isn’t driving decisions yet, I’d like to talk. Not a pitch. Just a conversation about what’s going on.
hello@soniagomes.me · soniagomes.me
Sónia
First published in the LinkedIn edition of In the Room, 15 June 2026.