Learn leadership from Elon Musk
The antagonistic billionaire is the pinnacle of terrible leadership. Become a better leader by doing the opposite of Elon Musk.
Leadership
What is value, and how to define it for a product?
A deep dive into value, its layers, and how understanding can empower design and product teams.
The Simple Phrase That Made Me a Terrible Leader
How saying “Let me know if you need anything” broke my team’s trust
Has ROI killed UX?
Why measuring UX in dollars misses the bigger picture
How to uniquely stamp out workplace ‘othering’
Workplace othering has the potential to damage a cohesive professional environment, but there are a number of ways to prevent disruption.
What to Do If You Give Feedback and Your Employee Still Doesn’t Change
This simple 3-step process can help you ramp up your feedback
“Leadership is Language”
“Leadership is language” — L. David Marquet
Time-to-critique: the metric that will level up how you manage your Design Team
Learn why measuring how fast and effectively can your design team members obtain high-quality critique is crucial for their success.
How to Get Your Team to Actually Speak Up
When you ask your team to share their ideas, thoughts, suggestions, or feedback, how many of them actually speak up?
5 Quick and Easy Ways to Earn Respect As A Leader (Without Being Perfect)
Some of these will surprise you
Painful Leadership Truths I Had to Learn the Hard Way
What I wish I’d known on day one as a new leader
We Need To Talk About Why the Gen Z Workforce Is So Angry
The Zoomer Tech Working Class Is Disengaged and Enraged. Here’s The Real Reason Why.
Why Gantt Charts Are Killing Your Project Success (And What to Do Instead)
Modern project planning that actually works
5 work attitudes that lead to disaster (and airplane crashes)
How UX teams can benefit from 50 years of aviation safety insights.
How to Make It as Easy as Possible for Your New Managers To Thrive
The leader’s leader toolkit to help your new managers make a strong start on their road to success
The 3 Stages of Communication in Leadership
How To Master The Art (and Craft) of Communication
The New Language of Design Leadership
Crafting Strategies that merge empathy, data, and bold provocation
The Design Leader Dilemma — Smashing Magazine
Design leaders are expected to deliver the impossible. Instead of trying, we need to redefine our role from implementor to enabler.
Measuring Design: Essential Metrics
Measuring design outcomes is a vital exercise that every product team should practice. I’m starting a series of posts about measuring…
Cutting Middle Management: Bayer's Costly Experiment One Year Later
In a bold move to restore profitability, Bayer CEO Bill Anderson cut out most of the company’s management roles last year. Here's what happened next.
Bad idea: You can’t measure productivity
The key points from Martin Fowler’s 2003 article “Cannot Measure Productivity”:
Do You Need to Manage Change Effectively? Use Adaptive Leadership
How the 5 principles of adaptive leadership support change management.
Keeping Your Employees Accountable as a Manager
Yes it can be done
Why you should embrace the ‘outcomes over outputs’ mindset
‘Outcomes over outputs’ is a common refrain, but why do we still see so many design teams’ deliverables go unused?
Design rituals: How we ensure high-caliber design outcomes
An inclusive high-performance culture in your design team needs thoughtful and well-crafted rituals. These conscious feedback loops and…
Continuous planning for UX teams
Manage UX backlogs the Agile way
7 Managers Later, Here’s the Good and the Bad
Hoping to one day become the best leader I can be
How to Help Your Team Take More Ownership
Here’s how to help your team step up, take charge, and own the outcomes — inside and outside their usual boundaries.
The Weaponization of “Assume Good Intent”
Some people operate on the theory that they didn’t mean any harm and people should just quit being so sensitive. But instead of asking…
How to be a Manager People Actually Want to Work For
Don’t be the boss from hell!