Design Leadership

Just Grow Up: Why Design Maturity Models Might be Harming Our Industry!

Designers often look to design maturity models as benchmarks, comparing their own companies to idealised industry standards and thinking, “We’re so behind!” This can spark a drive to “improve” the company’s design maturity, which often translates into attempts to “educate” leadership on what they’re doing “wrong” or how the organisation can “catch up.” But is maturity really the most useful framework here? Or might labelling a company as “immature” potentially miss the point? 🤔

Design Leadership

Moving from “System One” to “System Two” Thinking for Product Decisions

Every day people approach company leaders with problems in need of a quick fix. “The team is going to miss its deadline if we don’t do something about it” they’ll say, or “we just had some some really bad customer feedback and we need to make good. What do you think we should do?” Leaders want to feel helpful and decisive so they’ll often think about the problem for a few seconds before coming up with a solution. “Let’s bring in some freelancers to get the project over the finish line on time” they might say or “let’s give the client a free upgrade to keep them on side”.

Design Leadership

The Truth About Strategy

Most people massively over complicate the concept of “strategy”. Ultimately a strategy is the general approach you are going to take in order to deliver your company mission/goals. Having a clear strategy is important as it allows people to decide between competing approaches, markets, customer segments, activities and product features. As such your strategy is the thing that informs and connects what the company is trying to do and how it is trying to do it, with the people who are responsible for delivering it.

Design Leadership

Why Design Leads are the Most Important Role in Highly Effective Design Orgs

I’ve long believed that, rather than Heads, Directors and VPs of design being the pivotal team role, we actually need to focus on hiring more Lead Designers. In this article I attempt to explain what a Lead Designer is, what they do, and why they play such an important role in high performing teams.

Design Leadership

Why I Chose to Spend 6-Months at a VC Fund

If you know me, then you'll know that I'm all about increasing the impact design can have on the world. For the past 20 years I’ve focused on using design to solve meaningful problems, remove frustrations, and make people's lives that tiny bit better.

Design Leadership

Dealing With Conflict Using the PLEASE Framework

In my previous post I shared the idea that high functioning teams are comfortable with high levels of conflict, as long as it’s the right type of conflict— namely constructive conflict around “things” rather than judgemental conflict around “people”. This idea is sometimes described as “task conflict” versus “personality conflict”.