The way organizations are approaching product development and emerging technologies are constantly changing. At the same time our practice as designers is evolving with new tools, techniques, and approaches, surfacing at a pace that can be hard to keep up with.

This talk was filmed at Leading De...

In this talk Abi looks at how we can really make our 121's a success. From establishing trust, creating mutual purpose, and helping your team achieve their goals Abi takes us through her own journey with 121's and shares what's she's learnt along the way!

This talk was filmed at Leading Design F...

By nature designers thrive in the realm of collaboration and connectedness, generating feelings of mutual identification and empathy with others. As individual contributors this is a wonderful strength, but when designers step into leadership positions with new levels of accountability, collabora...

As a leadership coach, Cap has completed approximately 600 one-on-ones with designers and design leaders, as well as their counterparts in engineering and product management. Whenever he takes on a new client, they consistently ask him about the common threads, the struggles we all face across va...

Using words, scribbles, and pixels Farai has spent the last 14 years helping design and build products and teams in the UK, South Africa and Canada.

Today, he makes a living designing interactions and leading a team as a UX Manager at Shopify in Ottawa.

In South Africa, Farai designed banking a...

You are the problem

As designers we often find ourselves being frustrated and feeling unheard. The struggle to “get a seat at the table” seems to be widespread. Why is this? Is it simply that product people don’t listen and tech people don’t care about users? Or that business people think they k...

As the move to establish in-house design teams accelerates, it turns out there’s very little common wisdom on what makes for a successful design organisation. Books and presentations tend to focus on process, methods, and tools, leaving a gap of knowledge when it comes to organisational and opera...

The Peter Principle (not named for me, but for organizational consultant Laurence J. Peter) states that because people are promoted based on prior success, they end up rising to a level of their incompetence, because the skills that got them there aren't those that will carry them forward. This i...

The value of design (that's more than just business)

Design has a seat at the table now, but what do you say? What do you stand up for? Are we really there just to make the business metric grow through experience efficiencies, or is the value of design to make the business stand for something ot...

New and established design leaders face continuously evolving challenges as they lead design through challenges such as complexity, competition, conflict, and, at times, even chaos. The focus on leading yourself while you drive transformation for your customer communities has never been more impo...

Everyone wants to hire great talent. But how do we define great? Does that change over time? How do you know you’re recruiting and hiring the right people? How do you retain and develop talent, giving your team meaning, purpose, and ownership?

In the Design Career Journey, we explore a framewor...