Design Management: How to Build, Develop, and Manage Effective Design Teams

Designers are more in-demand than ever, and companies all over the world are creating new leadership roles to manage them. With only a few select institutions teaching effective design management skills, self-taught design managers are on the rise and resources are needed to guide them. This book will help you hone your leadership skills and magnify your team’s potential.

Eager designers will learn the behavioral abilities required to lead and manage impactful and efficient teams using a systemic, context-agnostic, and therefore repeatable approach. While effective design management is vital in these times of complexity and fast change in organizations, the available literature on design management is insufficient, predominately informative, and unfortunately, not actionable. This book fills that gap by illuminating the soft skills you need to lead your team to success.

You’ll gain confidence about how to optimize meetings, run successful kickoffs, manage yourself, and how to best approach and frame your working environment. Whether you are a designer looking to lead, or a member of an organization looking for guidance on how to better incorporate design, this book belongs on your shelf. Design Management is here to assist you in the long haul.

What You’ll Learn

• Comprehend the underlying social and psychological dynamics of leadership and management
• Cultivate the behavioral elements of a design manager
• Understand the building blocks of a design leader
• Establish your core practices and create a self-development program
• Develop and project healthy and sustainable influence
• Build trust, create psychological safety, and fulfill the social needs of high-performing teams
• Coach individuals and groups to unlock creativity and nurture creative collaboration
• Optimize in-person and remote design operations

Who This Book Is For
Everyone who desires to expand and deepen their knowledge of design leadership and management, comprehending the social and psychological underpinning elements of this discipline. Aspiring or recently appointed design leaders and managers who necessitate a practical education in this field and individuals already in charge of a group who aspire to evolve their understanding to advance their career toward a Head of Design or Chief Design Officer role.

Andrea Picchi is Head of Design at River Island. With a background in cognitive psychology and computer science, he subsequently studied the business applications of design thinking at MIT Sloan School of Management. Andrea developed his leadership and management knowledge working with, and for, companies such as Apple, Google, Samsung, Sony, and Nokia. In the past decade, he has been building, leading, and managing successful teams that created products and services used by millions of people worldwide.