Design the Hard Way

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Marcos Nähr

You're doing design leadership the hard way. So am I. 20+ years of it, across companies where design was never a given. This is what I learned.

📍 Austria

Lessons from Growing a Platform Org 3X

Scaling a design team is not like scaling engineering. You cannot just subdivide the problem, add people, and watch throughput increase. Design teams face a different kind of complexity: the more designers you add, the harder it becomes to maintain a coherent vision and a consistent user experience. The complexity

From Hope to Evidence in Design

Enterprise design organizations often fall prey to "hope-driven design" – creating products based on what they hope users want rather than building systems that accurately detect and respond to actual user needs. Design teams in complex technical environments operate with two fundamental challenges: 1. Confusion between mental models (the

Why Design Operations Matter

The integration of Design Operations (DesignOps) into the UX design ecosystem marks an important step toward achieving efficiency, creativity, and scale. This emerging discipline plays a crucial role in supporting design teams. It streamlines operations, effectively addresses bottlenecks, and empowers designers to concentrate on creating immersive design experiences. In the

Essentials of People Management in UX Design: Key Strategies for Nurturing Design Talent

Effective people management is key to the success of UX initiatives. Nurturing and managing design talent is essential for fostering productivity, motivation, and innovation within UX teams. Implementing core strategies is key to achieving these goals. Understanding UX Management UX management involves supervising UX design activities within an organization to

The UX approach for complex products

A complex product or system is like a big puzzle where all the pieces are connected and depend on each other. When one piece moves, it can have a big impact on the others. It's hard to understand everything about a complex system because of all these connections.

Unlocking Your Team Potential: Design Team Principles

Designers are already familiar with design principles or the key characteristics and goals for a product, which helps designers validate their design decisions. In addition to the design principles that drive your product design decisions, you also need to define the principles that drive behavior, attitudes, and aspirations of the

Stand up for what you believe in

Leadership in design requires the ability to stand up for what you believe in. It's important for leaders to defend their design teams and promote proposals that put humans at the center because these proposals are ultimately good for the company. As design leaders, we should advocate for