Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You
Are you ready to take the leap from practicing design to managing designers? If you’re an up-and-coming designer–or even if you’ve been managing for awhile–this book is here to help you learn practical, hands-on approaches to leading people. Designing and managing are different skills, and Russ and Chris have made the mistakes they want to help you avoid while you grow as a design manager.
Chris Avore leads the product design efforts at Nasdaq, where his team designs the vision of a more elegant, useful, and profitable portfolio of software products for the global stock exchange.
In less than five years he has successfully positioned design and its methods as the primary competitive differentiator to Nasdaq’s customers, colleagues and partners, and the executive team.
His distributed team of generalists and specialists build what they design after they’ve researched the viability, desirability, and usefulness of a feature or product. Prior to Nasdaq Chris was an independent design practitioner for startups, agencies, enterprise customers, and the federal government for over 10 years.
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Russ Unger is an Experience Design leader and facilitator who helps organizations build design practices and teams. As a Chief of Staff, he brings agile, strategic, and design thinking-based approaches as part of executive leadership.
Russ is co-author of the books A Project Guide to UX Design: For User Experience Designers in the Field or in the Making; Designing the Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation; and Speaker
Chapter 1: Transition – From Designer to Design Leader
Chapter 2: Managing vs. Leading
Chapter 3: Advice from the Field – What to do with your seat at the table
Chapter 4: Team / Skill Assessment
Chapter 5: Planning for Team Growth
Chapter 6: Team Diversity & You
Chapter 7: Planning for Team Reduction
Chapter 8: How to: Write Job Descriptions
Chapter 9: How to: Interview & Hire for Roles
Chapter 10: How to: On-board New Team Members (and Other Non-Designers)
Chapter 11: 1:1 Meetings with Team
Chapter 12: Difficult Situations with Teams
Chapter 13: Performance Reviews
Chapter 14: Team Charter
Chapter 15: (Hacking the) Org Chart
Chapter 16: Empowering Your Team
Chapter 17: Side Projects
Chapter 18: Budgeting for Failure
Chapter 19: Team Decision-Making
Chapter 20: How to Work with Distributed Colleagues
Chapter 21: Critique in Teams
Chapter 22: Collaboration
Chapter 23: Creating Patterns, Standards, etc. for Re-Use
Chapter 24: Project Estimations
Chapter 25: Presenting Work
Chapter 26: Getting Everyone on the Design Team
Chapter 27: Managing Up & Across
Chapter 28: Dealing with Organizational Politics
Chapter 29: How to Say No and Not Feel Like a Jerk About It
