The CEOzilla Effect: When Control Suffocates Creativity

I've watched it happen more times than I can count. A CEO or executive becomes obsessed with choosing paint colors and fabric swatches for the new office redesign, micromanaging decisions that should be left to the interior designer they just hired. It's like watching someone plan a wedding where every napkin fold becomes a referendum on their vision and taste. Except this isn't a wedding. It's a software company.

I call this the CEOzilla pattern, and it's one of the most reliable red flags I've learned to spot during job interviews. When leadership can't trust professionals to pick out furniture, they sure as hell won't trust you to make design decisions about their products. What looks like attention to detail is actually a massive trust deficit wrapped in executive authority.

Here's the thing that makes it worse: these same CEOs who obsess over office aesthetics are often the ones who, when you recommend user testing, hit you with "Steve Jobs never did user testing, so why should we?" I've heard this excuse at so many companies that I started to wonder if there was a book somewhere teaching executives to invoke Steve Jobs as justification for ignoring their customers.

Let me be clear: Steve Jobs has unintentionally done more to make the lives of UX designers difficult than any other single human. The myth that Apple doesn't do user testing is total bullshit—Apple designers did an entire WWDC presentation from 2014 that went through their testing practices in detail—but that hasn't stopped countless executives from using his name to shut down any process that might challenge their assumptions.

The CEOzilla pattern reveals something deeper about how these organizations actually work. When a leader needs to control everything from paint colors to product features, they're not building a company. Instead, they're building a monument to their own taste and judgment. And in that kind of environment, there's no room for the messy, collaborative process that actually produces good design.

I learned to recognize this pattern during my pre-pandemic job interviews in the DC area. You'd go through multiple phone screenings before finally sitting in their conference room, and if you paid attention, the office itself would tell you everything. Had they recently redesigned the space? Were they taking on more space than they needed? Was upper management deeply involved in aesthetic choices? Were there broken-down cardboard furniture boxes stashed in a conference room somewhere? Each of these was a data point in a pattern that almost always ended the same way: within a year, layoffs would follow.

The CEOzilla isn't just controlling: they're usually mimicking other CEOs they admire, “mavericks” copying mavericks. Elizabeth Holmes tried it with the black turtleneck. Countless others have followed Elon Musk's playbook of mass layoffs disguised as efficiency. Wearing a black turtleneck doesn't make you visionary, it just makes you someone wearing a turtleneck.

The level of CEO involvement in design decisions has become my most reliable gauge for how much actual agency I'll have as a designer. If they can't let go of the small stuff, they're never going to trust you with the big stuff. And that's not a problem you can solve by being better at your job or more diplomatic in meetings. It's baked into the organizational DNA.

As long as there's an authoritarian leader who trusts no one with making decisions, it will be difficult if not impossible for any designer to make an impact. You can have all the skills, all the process knowledge, all the user research in the world, but if leadership needs to approve the font size on every button, you're not doing UX work, you are a pixel pusher. You're just making someone else's aesthetic choices a reality.

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