Liftoff!
Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You
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.
Testimonials
Finally! A book that not only takes new design leaders step-by-step through the care and feeding of their teams, but reminds them time and again how to lead inclusively, and with heart.
Kara DeFrias, Director of Experience Design, Obama White House
Chris and Russ have created a must-read playbook with actionable insights and strategies for any leader who wants to create a world-class design team.
Anna Ewing, former CIO of Nasdaq, advisor, board member
This book is full of advice and guidance I wish I’d had covering vital topics like inclusion and team mental health. Managers, read it to uncover your weak spots. Aspiring managers, read it to ensure you lead well.
Katja Forbes, design leader
The trajectory from ‘leading designer’ to ‘design leader’ is rarely a straight line, but Chris Avore and Russ Unger have created just the practical, tactical guidebook to keep you on course.
Jesse James Garrett, author of The Elements of User Experience
Finally, a book that provides detailed and practical advice covering the entire lifecycle of hiring, integrating, and nurturing a team of designers to excel.
Bruno Figueiredo, Director, Xperienz and curator of UX Lisbon
Imagine a Venn Diagram with leadership, management, and design at the center—it’s this book. Russ and Chris have laid out a simple and comprehensive guide to the ‘what if,’ ‘what about,’ ‘it depends,’ and other common questions asked when building, managing, nurturing, and leading a design team for an organization.
Eduardo Ortiz, CEO, Founding Partner, &Partners
A practical guide to the real-world challenges of design leadership and design management. Each chapter felt like a resounding affirmation of hard-learned lessons. The perfect read for those newer to leadership and those always looking to reflect and grow their approach.
Meriah (Garrett) Moulton, Chief Design Officer, USAA
Don’t be fooled. This book is not just about design leadership. It’s about leading. Period. The lessons in this book have found their way into my engineering leadership style, and they will for you, too.
Johnny Boursiquot, multi-disciplined engineer, architect, and community leader
A rare design leadership and management playbook that offers comprehensive and practical examples to teach designers how to make an impact.
Kristin Skinner, coauthor Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams and founder of &GSD
Russ and Chris have assembled a well-rounded overview of all the activities a design manager might need to do on the job, with a focus on creating inclusive and supportive teams. I will definitely use this as a textbook in my Design Management class.
Karen McGrane, Faculty Member, School of Visual Arts MFA program in Interaction Design
A wealth of wisdom for new leaders to impact experience outcomes by bridging influence gaps from talented, but fledgling design teams.
Karen Pascoe, SVP Customer Experience & Design, Mastercard
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.
- 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.
