Design Leadership talks

Design leadership is about the conditions in which good design work happens: how teams are formed and run, how decisions get made, and how designers work with product managers, engineers and the rest of an organisation. It covers formal management roles, but also the influence any designer has on how a team works together.

For product and design teams, these questions often decide outcomes more than individual skill does. A talented team that lacks trust, clear goals or a way to resolve disagreement will struggle to ship good work. As design has taken on a larger role in many companies, leading designers, recruiting them and making room for creative work have become skills in their own right.

The talks in this hub cover design teams, leadership and team management. On building teams, Aaron Walter talks about building great design teams, Laura Klein about building happy product teams and Be Kaler about UX recruitment. Rochelle King addresses managing conflict, and Jeff Veen covers crafting a creative culture in Momentum and gives Design for Disaster. On leadership itself, Simon Sinek gives three talks, How great leaders inspire action, First why and then trust and Why Leaders Eat Last, and Jason Fried asks why work doesn’t happen at work.

Product leadership is a thread too. Ken Norton argues for thinking in orders of magnitude, Paul Adams presents The Future Product Canvas and Don’t Join the Cult, Peter Merholz argues that the experience is the product, and Jeff Gothelf talks about evidence-based teams and what he has learned from five years of Lean UX. Dave Snowden on making sense of complexity, Christina Wodtke on why execution beats ideas and Jon Kolko on empathy round out a collection recorded between 2010 and 2018 at events such as Mind the Product, TED, beyond tellerrand and IxDA.