On July 21, 2023, two films opened on the same day: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. The internet, inevitably, turned it into a meme — “Barbenheimer” —
and a genuine cultural moment, with people scheduling double features to watch a somber
atomic-bomb drama and a pink comedy back to back in one sitting.
I have a small, strange footnote in that same weekend: I was Lead Product Designer for the team that shipped UNO: Barbie the Movie, our UNO title tied to the film. So I was living on the pink side of Barbenheimer. But it’s the other half of that meme I keep coming back to, because Oppenheimer is one of the best case studies I know in leading brilliant people without holding any formal authority over them.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was scientific director of the Los Alamos Laboratory — but he didn’t hold military rank, and the Manhattan Project’s actual chain of command ran through General Leslie Groves. Many of the physicists at Los Alamos were more senior than Oppenheimer, more decorated, some already Nobel laureates — people with every conventional reason not to defer to him. What made the lab function wasn’t rank. It was that Oppenheimer could take an entire room of brilliant, strong-willed specialists working on wildly different pieces of the problem and synthesize their thinking into one technical direction the whole room actually trusted.
I think about that dynamic constantly, because it describes my actual job better than most
org charts do. As a product designer, I don’t have direct reports. What I have is
responsibility for a vision — communicated clearly enough that a graphic designer working on
physical components, a UX designer working on a companion app, and an engineer working on
the underlying tech all understand not just what they’re building, but why it needs to feel
a certain way when it’s done. Nobody on that team reports to me in an official manner. The only authority I have is the quality of the idea and how well I can get it across.
Lesson: When you can’t lead by authority, you lead by clarity. Being the person who can
see the whole shape of the problem is worth more to the team and product. It’s nice to have both, but that’s not always the circumstance.
And somewhere in an alternate universe, there’s a version of this post where I get to say I worked
on Oppenheimer merchandise instead, and the rest writes itself a little more cleanly. For now I’ll stick with Barbie.
