Design Leadership Memos

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago my belief that observation-driven performance management processes do designers a particular type of disservice in typical tech organisations. I also mentioned that I had a developing thought on what a good alternative might be. Today I’m going to expand on that a

1. 🚩 Homework, Spec work, whiteboard tasks, etc. - This has been spoken about endlessly so I won’t go on too much about it, but suffice it to say if the only way a hiring process can establish the qualifications of a designer is to get them to sit down

I’ve long held a belief that observation-driven performance reviews do a disproportionate dis-service to designers. The model of managerial assessment, multi-disciplinary calibration and stack ranking performed at departmental levels lead invariably to worse outcomes for designers than they do for other disciplines because we are outnumbered by people who

I first did at-scale design systems work a decade ago whilst leading a team of 200 designers in an organisation of 20000 people1 and quickly came to see the output of this work as both: 1. Infrastructure to create scalable high-quality user experiences, and  2. The recasting of the role

Throughout the 20 odd years that I’ve been designing products and designing organisations, I’ve repeatedly heard designers lamenting their lack of access to long-term strategy-making and vision-setting circles. I feel like this was even a core part of the whole ‘seat at the table’ meme which spent a

Design leadership is a heady blend of Culture, Strategy, Organisational Design, Talent Management and Collaboration. So just the easy stuff.