Tony Walt
Senior Director, Digital Platforms at Spectrum. I lead design and technology for the tools ~70,000 frontline employees depend on every day.
These days I build mostly systems and teams — human and digital — that carry my standard into every build. Quality from the interface to the code, regardless of who creates it.
- frontline employees
- ~70,000
- design-system adoption
- 5 orgs · 40+ teams
- R&D prototypes
- 580+
How I lead
Friction is a feature, not a bug.
I don't make disagreement go away. I make it productive. On the Agent Tools team we made it doctrine. The tension between roles is intentional, healthy, and necessary. Two years on, the team calls this "communicating through friction," a norm nobody has to enforce.
Listen first, then reconcile.
Before I propose a fix, I get everyone's real position in writing, not my guess at it. Same first move in a nine-person values exercise in 2018, merging a design and dev team in 2020, and settling a split team in 2023. Three teams, five years, one habit.
Set the structure so the right work doesn't depend on goodwill.
The durable fix is never me saying no in the moment. It's writing down what the team won't do, so the structure says it and no one has to. At the design systems team we called it the Off Ramp. Every team since has gotten its own version.
Strong opinions, loosely held.
I want people to hold a real opinion, not a hedge, and the room safe enough to argue it until we land somewhere better. Years after I handed off that team, its own leadership deck still lists this as an operating principle. Their words, not mine.
The common thread is building habits into systems and people, then handing the reins over. The rituals I started, others run today.
Inspect the claim