My takeaways from the Design Leadership Summit @ Toronto (Nov 4—6, 2019)

I had the opportunity to attend to the Design Leadership Summit last week at Toronto, and I honestly wish I would be a millionaire so I could have paid flights and tickets for many of my friends/designers to be there as well.

Since I couldn’t make those millions on time for the conference (🙃), I will make my best effort to capture a gist of what top leaders from top organizations tried to convey to the audience during an intense 2-day schedule.

After the event was finished and I went through my notes, I kept thinking “what’s on the mind of all these amazing leaders? is there any pattern here?”. This post is —basically— an answer to those questions.

Here are my main takeaways:

I broke down my takeaways into 5 ‘concepts’ or ideas that I heard several speakers reference in their talks:

1. Designers finally have the infamous “seat at the table”.

While it might seem a bit trite at this point, the idea of a ‘seat at the table’ for designers was a pervasive topic during the talks. What does that seat look like? but, more importantly, what are we supposed to do once we get there? Some useful things to do, as suggested by the design leaders on the stage:

• Orchestrate the transformation of the entire organization towards a higher level of Design Maturity — Jared M Spool
• Accelerate learning; amplify innovation; drive more value — Jen Cardello (VP, UX Research & Insights @ Fidelity)
• Actively manage & measure trust (between your product and your audience) — Michael Chanover (VP Design @ Khan Academy)
• Be an advocate for Inclusion — Shipra Kayan (Prev. UX Director @ UpWork), Jenna Billota (Director of Design @ Dropbox)
• Create the conditions under which Design will thrive — Kaaren Hanson (EVP Experience Design @ Wells Fargo)
• Articulate a Vision for success — Peter Merholz (Consultant & Author, Adaptive Path)
• Provide leverage; leverage yourself and allow your team to do good work — also from Peter
• Evangelize the work, wins & learnings of your team — Chetana Deorah (Prev. Director of Design @ Netflix)

2. Setting clear expectations — a foundation for the exercise of leadership.

Most speakers suggested that team charters must be a requirement on any design team. Vision, purpose, goals and other key elements should be succinctly expressed and easily accessible by any team, regardless of its scale. In the words of Peter Merholz:

“what a designer needs the most is a clear purpose”.

Similarly, most speakers stressed the importance of having defined career ladders for their team members. Jasmine Friedl was one of those speakers, which is no surprise considering the amazing work her team has done creating career ladders for Product Design and Product Managers at Intercom.

3. Diversity and Inclusion are, indeed, our responsibility as design leaders.

From Jenna’s talk, ‘Building and Cultivating Diverse Design Teams’

Nothing new here, really; but Shipra Kayan (prev. Upwork) and Jenna Billota (Dropbox) delivered wonderful talks full of actionable ways of advocating for inclusion. In Jenna’s words, one of the design leader’s biggest goal is to:

“have everyone think about your company: ‘I feel like I belong here’ ”.

4. Your user doesn’t care about your Design Ops.

Or, in other words, users don’t care about the structures of your teams. They care about having a delightful, cohesive experience when they use your product. Several leaders touched briefly on the importance of avoiding silos when defining team structures, and always keeping an eye on the big picture and how it comes together.

Design Ops in a nutshell

Regardless of the fact that users don’t care much about it, Design Ops was definitely one of the most popular topics covered during the talks, with speakers like Jared Spool, Jen Cardello, Dave Malouf, Anne Purves and Peter Merholz sharing really actionable insights on how to run design operations at organizations of different scale and (design) maturity levels.

5. The State of Design Leadership.

What I love about these events, is that I always find them to be useful ‘reality checks’ for me. Listening to the speakers, and talking to other really interesting folks —leaders and contributors in very diverse teams— was a reminder that we all face similar issues, and that —ultimately— there are no silver bullets for those issues.

Thomas Lowry really summed it up in this slide from his deck:

This could have been the title of the entire event, IMHO 👏👏👏

Conclusion

This event really got me thinking about how the must successful design teams and organizations are run, and how can I bring as much of those ideas to my own team. I couldn’t be more thankful for the work that Preet Arjun Singh and his team did to put together this great event, kudos to Design X for all the hard work behind it.

Did you attend the conference? I would love to know your thoughts on my notes; let me know if I missed something critical in the comments 💪