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Liftoff!

liftoff spot image

Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You

By Chris Avore & Russ Unger

Published: July 2020
Paperback: 384 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1933820-80-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-1933820-40-8

Liftoff! is your guide to leveling up as a design manager and leader. Its experience-driven approach—written by designers for designers—will help you hire and scale teams, develop careers, learn why diversity matters to your business, and solidify design’s role in your organization. Liftoff! will elevate your skills to lead your team and company to new heights.

Liftoff! is your guide to leveling up as a design manager and leader. Its experience-driven approach—written by designers for designers—will help you hire and scale teams, develop careers, learn why diversity matters to your business, and solidify design’s role in your organization. Liftoff! will elevate your skills to lead your team and company to new heights.

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Kim Goodwin
Chapter 1: Surprise! You’re in Charge of People Now
Chapter 2: Designing Diversity and Inclusion in Your Teams
Chapter 3: Designing Your Hiring Process
Chapter 4: Performance Profiles and Interview Guides
Chapter 5: Screening Designers
Chapter 6: Interviewing Potential Team Members
Chapter 7: Offers, Negotiations, and Onboarding
Chapter 8: Unifying the Team Culture with Charters
Chapter 9: Designing the One-on-Ones
Chapter 10: Leading Continuous Critique
Chapter 11: Presenting Work
Chapter 12: Saying No
Chapter 13: Developing Designers
Chapter 14: Scaling Design
Chapter 15: Designing Influence
Chapter 16: Escape Velocity

FAQ

These common questions and their short answers are taken from Chris Avore and Russ Ungers’ book Liftoff!: Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.

  1. Is this a how-to book?
    Of course not! And, well, maybe. We’ve included a lot of what we’ve learned based on our own personal experiences and our collabora- tion with each other—and others—which we view as a framework to help you on your way. You certainly might be able to take what we’ve written and apply it as-is, especially when it comes to the hiring pro- cess (see Chapters 3–7). There’s step-by-step instructions to facilitate a design charter workshop (Chapter 8). And Chapter 15 includes specific ways to tweak generally-used user experience design activities to include executive leaders, which may elevate your influence in the company. But there are also a lot of tips, stories, and experiences in this book that aren’t necessarily meant to be applied directly. Instead, use them to build your own foundation for how you make decisions relevant to your situation and environment.

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