Collection of books, articles, and other resources for leading design teams. Book Review: Liftoff! (Bonus)

9 min readSep 26, 2020

I’ve recently completed a detailed review of a book about design leadership with the title “Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You”. I thought I’d create one last article filled with all of the resources that have helped me until today. As a bonus on top of the bonus, I want to give a bit more context for each link, so you can decide if it’s worth your time or not.

My list surely comes close to the knowledge stored in the Austrian National Library, right? (Source)

Books

Radical Candor: Core concept of the book is to care about your people and challenge them directly. Otherwise you might not be candid and direct enough about providing them feedback and guidance as a leader. Personally, I enjoyed the chapters on career conversations and was able to use them effectively for one of my direct reports.

The Effective Manager: This book is a very impressive consolidation of four key management behaviors. Building effective relationships, talking about performance, growing the skills of your directs and pushing work down are the foundation for every manager that wants to be effective. In this book, Mark Horstman talks about four manager tools that are teachable, repeatable methods for achieving the above goals.

Creativity Inc: Brilliant mix of storytelling and leadership principles from Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull. I’ve found it extremely helpful to read about the struggles and successes from such a creative powerhouse of an organization and what made them tick.

The Effective Hiring Manager: Accordin to the author Mark Horstman, hiring is the most important strategic objective for any manager. No matter how good you manage, if the team isn’t solid, there’s only so much you can do. Investing in the future of an organization by implementing effective hiring practices is something that’s covered in depth in this book.

Mapping Experiences: Jim Kalbach wrote this bible on various mapping techniques. If you’re curious about user journey maps, experience maps or similar techniques, you will find this book incredibly useful.

Discussing Design: This book focuses on critiquing designs and how we can become more effective in providing feedback on our work. My key learning was the differentiation between reactive feedback, directive feedback and critique. The third concept is said to be the most effective because it always talks about a design in relation to the goals it’s trying to achieve.

Design Leadership Handbook: Free e-book from InVision’s popular designbetter.com website. It’s a much lighter read and very easy to consume. It lacks a bit of depth but makes up for it with great sources you can read up on further.

Podcasts

Finding Our Way: Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett share their vast experience about design leadership topics. I really enjoyed the deep talks these two fellows had, who once co-founded Adaptive Path, but then went into different directions. One of the few senior design leaders there are.

Finding Our Way — Defining Your Charter, Part 1: The Why: Peter and Jesse made a two-parter on defining your charter, which had a lot of similar elements like the chapter in the book Liftoff! The first episode deals with topic of why you should even consider creating your team charter.

Finding Our Way — Defining Your Charter, Part 2: The How: The second part of the cast on team charters addresses how you can create one as a team. As in the previous part, there were a lot of similarities on how to do this. It appears that everybody agrees that a charter has to be created collaboratively, with the design leader guiding the team to a successful result and overruling only if necessary.

Manager Tools — Writing a job description: Guidance on how to create a job description for any job in your team.

Manager Tools — One-one-Ones: Why and how to conduct One-on-Ones. These are the most important manager tool according to the creators of this popular podcast.

Manager Tools — The Manager Tools Data — One-On-Ones: In this multi-part podcast you will hear about various experiments in regards to One-on-Ones and what worked best in terms of results and retention metrics. Weekly, bi-weekly or monthly? 30 minutes, 15 minutes or 60 minutes? Who should go first?

Manager Tools — One On Ones (Hall Of Fame): This link will show you a collection of podcasts on the topic of One-on-Ones. Manager Tools have created a lot more, but these are tagged as “Hall Of Fame”, so they deserve your attention if you’re serious about building effective relationships with your direct reports through O3s.

Manager Tools — How to Prewire a Meeting: Prewiring a meeting means to align with the attendees before the meeting even begins. This is a very effective technique to reduce the risk of getting sidetracked, not getting what you want and losing a political battle in an organisation.

Manager Tools — Effective Meetings: Simple rules on how to run better meetings. Spoiler: no laptops, start and end on time, ground rules, parking lot and more awaits you in this cast.

Manager Tools — The Management Trinity — Delegation: How to delegate effectively? Follow the guidance delivered in this cast and learn how to leverage your team to get things done while growing their skills at the same time.

Manager Tools — Assign work AND reporting: Many people don’t know the difference between delegating and assigning work. If you have a design project that you assign to a person that’s supposed to deliver it, then that’s not a delegation, but a work assignment. Work assignments shouldn’t be handled like delegations, so this cast clarifies that and also helps you to become more effective by always including reporting for your work assignments.

Manager Tools — Preparing Performance Reviews: Juicy podcast on how to prepare for your performance reviews with your direct reports. This isn’t complete without the one below.

Manager Tools — Delivering the Performance Review: Preparing is only half the battle. Delivering an effective performance review is crucial too. This cast helps you do just that.

Manager Tools — Peer One-one-Ones: 1:1s or O3s can also be done with your peers to build better relationships with them. This cast answers important questions such as “with who should I do this?” or “how many peer O3s should I have?”.

Communities

Rands leadership Slack: Rands aka Michael Lopp is an engineering leader (formerly Pinterest and Slack, now at Apple) and has created this big Slack community for leaders. Lots of engineering leaders are on here, but also a significant portion of designers and product folks.

Designer Hangout Slack: Huge community of designers, which also has a dedicated channel for leadership topics. I personally look up to a lot of senior folks who post there frequently.

Manager Tools Forum: Not really that active anymore, but the vast amount of posts are a big source of inspiration and information to me. Many folks have posted about their leadership and management challenges and many times even Mark Horstman has personally responded.

Videos

Wardley Mapping by Simon Wardley: Brilliant video on how to create a truly effective strategy map for your organization or business. I also dig Simon’s humour on the topic and how he himself has struggled throughout his career to create a useful vision that’s not just nonsensical for everybody besides senior leadership in an org.

Stanford’s “How to start a startup” lecture about culture: The whole video series is brilliant, but this one is specifically about organizational culture. Airbnb’s co-founder Brian Chesky presents this talk and it’s very interesting to watch despite its age.

UX Strategy Means Business by Jared Spool: Jared Spool appeals to all UX designers to start connecting their work to business goals. He does so in a simple to understand and compelling manner. I especially liked his summary on what executives care about (reducing cost, increasing new business, increasing existing business, etc.). Aligning your work with these business goals will get you much farther than just pushing for “better design” in your organization.

Articles / Studies

Why diversity matters: Original article from 2015 by McKinsey on why diversity matters. They’ve found that more diverse teams and organizations get better results, although a more diverse team is obviously not a guarantee to get great results by itself.

Delivering through diversity: Large follow up article on the one above. More info about executive team setups and the impact of minorities and gender diversity on business results.

Diversity wins: How inclusion matters: Newest article that covers similar topics and gives updates on recent developments in 2020 including the COVID-19 crisis. It appears that diversity remains a competitive advantage even in these times.

Why Women Don’t Apply for Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified: Insights into why more men will apply for your jobs even if they’re not 100% qualified compared to women.

Job advertisements that use masculine wording are less appealing to women: Proof that the wording of your job ads can have a significant impact on who will apply in terms of gender.

Asking the right questions during user research, interviews and testing: General tips on asking better questions during UX research and interviews.

Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of “Blind” Auditions on Female Musicians: Famous study that demonstrated the value of blind auditions and its impact on female hires for one specific orchestra.

Building an Experience Vision From a Journey Map: Getting started on journey mapping can be intimidating, but Jared Spool gives a great intro here.

The 8 competencies of user experience: a tool for assessing and developing UX Practitioners: Overview of 8 UX competencies that can be used to assess and develop your UX practitioners. I’ve used this and it was somewhat easy and useful.

How To Measure Your UX Design Skills?: Additional tips on how to measure and score your UX design skills.

Learning by teaching others is extremely effective: Need more reasons to encourage your senior folks to mentor and teach juniors? Read this.

Design Critiques at Figma: Elaborate overview on how Figma runs design critiques internally. Great resource that also includes basic principles on giving better feedback.

Parking Lots in UX Meetings and Workshops: Tips on how to “park non-agenda topics” to run more effective meetings. There’s not many things that are worse than getting sidetracked and not even achieving the key goal for a meeting you called.

5 Key Steps to Rehearsing a Presentation Like the Best TED Speakers: Tips on how to rehearse for your presentations.

Preventing the Executive Swoop and Poop with Design Sprints: Jared Spool offers tips on how to prevent executives from swooping into your projects and pooping all over it.

How to Say No: A Guide to Saying No Politely: Various examples that should help you to reject requests politely.

Shapes of UX designer: Learn about various exercises you can do also in collaboration with your team’s designers.

Go out and emphasize!: Deliveroo is sharing their design principles.

The Art of the OKR: Introduction to Objectives and Key Results and how to use them effectively by Christina Wodtke.

Misc

textio: Tool for getting feedback on your job descriptions and ads. Gives actionable tips on how to remove certain words that will bias the pool of candidates for your hiring process.

Government Design Principles: gov.uk shares their design principles on this elaborate page.

Peter Merholz’s website: Peter’s website has various resources and links to his works, including his book “Org Design for Design Orgs”.

Jeff Gothelf’s website: Author of “Lean UX”, “Sense & Respond” and “Forever Employable”. I always enjoy reading his blog posts as well.

A Stakeholder Interview Checklist: This is an excerpt from Kim Goodwin’s “Designing for the Digital Age” but works very well if you’re looking to interview stakeholders more effectively.

This collection is a bonus for a series of articles, where I reviewed the book “Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You” in detail: