WORKSHOP SERIES

Design Leadership Fundamentals I

Where makers become managers

As a designer, you’ve cultivated a set of skills to craft quality products and brands for others. Now you’re transitioning from maker to manager and navigating expectations about impact while learning a completely new set of skills — and you’re expected to fly when you’re just figuring out how to walk. (No pressure!)

This design leadership workshop was created to give you the support and guidance you need to become a truly great design leader. We’ll help you assess your leadership skills and learn the fundamentals of managing a team. You’ll reach the other side equipped with the tools and strategies for structuring and supporting your team members so they can deliver excellent design.

“As the title suggests – a great foundational class for aspiring and new design managers that will provide you with a starter kit of tools and frameworks you can use. It’s also a platform to share points of view and ask questions to people who are in the same boat as you.”

— Jane Park, Senior Design Manager at Microsoft Bing

“A firehose of excellent frameworks and thought starters to help you approach management with intentionality.”

— Siri Preston, Lead Product Designer at Target

“Like good UI: exactly what I needed, exactly when I needed it. Wonderfully structured, with terrific and relevant topics, valuable group participation, and two down-to-earth presenters who really knew their onions. I felt I was in good hands the entire time.”

— Louise Mintun, Content Design Group Manager at Intuit

Session details

Leadership as a creative practice

Many designers fear that in becoming a manager, they’ll lose their connection with creativity and making. But leadership too can be a creative role. This design leadership course will help you learn how to think differently about your design skills so you can leverage them in new and evolving responsibilities.

Design Leadership Skill Wheel

Design leadership can take many forms. This creative leadership course explores the key areas of design management and leadership that are required for success. By understanding your potential, you can map out your current skills and make a practical, actionable plan for growth.

Designing design teams

Successful design teams don’t just happen — they’re structured with intention. This design management course will help you learn how to recruit and grow a team that aligns with your purpose, delivers great experiences, and helps you excel as a leader.

Cultivating culture

Culture emerges from interactions within an organization, not from what we say it should be or think it should be. You can’t directly design culture, but you do have the power to design the system that fosters it. In this design leadership course, you’ll learn how to design experiments that leverage different elements of the system —your org — to enable a good culture to emerge.

Ensuring excellence

As a new manager, you’re making a move from solving the problem yourself (as an IC) to ensuring that your team solves the problem. But you have to make sure they’re solving the right problem, using the right processes, on a tight deadline, without compromising one iota of quality. (No pressure!) This design leadership course provides an overview of the fundamentals you need to ensure excellent output from your team — like how to set a vision and how to instill quality execution across the organization.

Catalyzing performance

Managing performance is one of the biggest challenges for all people leaders. Often as a manager, you’re evaluated on your team’s performance, so if you’re not helping them excel, it reflects directly back on you. Through connection, real-time feedback, and coaching, you can accelerate a person’s progress and continued growth. In this creative management course, learn how catalyzing individual team members can activate and maximize the potential of the entire team.

Design your time

The urgent always seems to win over the important — unless you design your time. This design leadership course provides a framework you can use to evaluate impact and effort. You’ll learn how to better value your time, as well as how to prioritize and protect it.