I recently launched Design Leaders Studio. It’s an online course, created to support designers taking their first steps into leadership. I poured everything I’ve learned about building and running design teams into this and I wanted to share how and why I did it. — From design to leadership ⛰️ My path to head of design roles was a pretty standard route from practising designer, to lead designer and then to design team manager. …

Have you ever wondered how someone fills their time when they work in a design team but don’t design anything? Probably something to do with meetings and spreadsheets right? Well let’s take a look at a typical day for a head of product design. — 9am : Warming up with email, slack, calendar 📅 My day starts in probably the same way everyone’s does; by picking through the remnants of the previous day and figuring out what’s going on. I check email, slack and my calendar to see what’s happening today and where my focus should be.

When you lead a design team, of any size and shape, it becomes part of your leadership responsibility to develop the talent you have. You must help your designers develop new skills, embrace new experiences as learning opportunities, and imbue a sense of progress. …

When I took up my role as Head of UX at Virgin Atlantic, we didn’t have an ongoing program of optimisation and experimentation. I tackled this opportunity by putting in place the following 6 point plan. 1. Dedicated effort Initially there was no dedicated role(s) across the department to run an optimisation effort…

The line between great leadership and being a terrible boss is surprisingly fine. Each day you’ll find yourself walking a tightrope of nuance that spans between confidence and ignorance. …

At the end of 2017 I took the role of head of user experience at Virgin Atlantic. What follows is a ‘warts and all’ run down of how I built the UX team from scratch. The steps I’ve taken in my new role as a design leader, the wins I had, mistakes I made, and the lessons I’ve learnt along the way. — Stepping into the role Preparing for day one Shortly after accepting the role I started gathering notes on how I wanted my first 90 days to go. I had the opportunity to swap notes with Alison Austin, who was also preparing to start a new role. …