Team Management talks

Team management covers how design and product teams are built, led and kept healthy: hiring, structure, roles, rituals, conflict, culture and the conditions that let people do their best work. It sits between leadership, which sets direction, and the everyday process of getting work done.

For UI, UX and product design, the team is the tool that produces the product. How designers are embedded in cross-functional teams, how decisions are made, how conflict is handled and how much trust exists all show up in the quality of the work. Many problems that look like design problems are really team problems.

The 16 talks here run from 2010 to 2016. At Mind the Product, Laura Klein covers “Building Happy Product Teams”, Peter Merholz “The Experience is the Product” and Rochelle King “Managing Conflict”. Aaron Walter talks about “Building Great Design Teams” and Jeff Veen about “Momentum: Crafting a Creative Culture” at beyond tellerrand, and Jeff Veen also gives “Design for Disaster”. Christina Wodtke argues “Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.” at an IxDA event, while Peter Morville and Be Kaler speak at Northern User Experience. Jeff Gothelf, Dave Snowden and Nishant Kothary contribute talks on evidence-based teams, complexity and “The Design of People”. Simon Sinek gives three talks on leadership and trust, and Jason Fried explains “Why work doesn’t happen at work”. Recruitment is a sub-topic.