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Design Management Masterclass

Slava Shestopalov

Your instructor
Slava Shestopalov

Workshop includes:

  • 🔖  Examples to take away
  • 🗣  Active participation
  • 🎁  Workshop recordings
  • 🏅  Smashing Certificate

Unfortunately, this workshop is fully sold out! But you can join the waiting list in case a ticket becomes available:

Workshop, 4×2h + Q&A • Thu & Fri, Nov 30 – Dec 8 2023
9:30 AM – 12:00 PM PT • 18:30 – 21:00 CET • Check your time zone ⏰

Design leaders often grow out of yesterday’s designers. You are a designer with brilliant soft skills? Perhaps, you’ll be offered a leadership position someday. It has become common that heads of design, UX directors, and team leaders appear with tiny prior management experience. That’s why we are destined to discover bits of this new skill set the hard way. But should it be like that?

This workshop series will structure your awareness of design management in general and your new role in your organization in particular.

Here’s What You Should Be Expecting:

  • Interactive live sessions

    4 × 2.5h live sessions

  • Visual Exercises

    To help you become a better design manager

  • Personal and practical

    Apply to your situation immediately

  • Life-time access

    To all video recordings and examples

  • Dedicated Q&A time

    To ask all your questions

  • Smashing Certificate

    A well-deserved reward for your work


Through a set of visual exercises in FigJam/Miro/Kahoot, we’ll touch upon the following areas and topics:

  • Role scope: understanding and shaping your place in the company’s hierarchy and activities.
  • Stakeholder management: figuring out whom to collaborate with and how to do it right.
  • Employee journey: gap and opportunity analysis. Your success as a manager is a sum of your team members’ successes.
  • Building a system of UX goals and matching them with the company’s business mission.

You’ll learn to

  • understand and shape your first managerial role in design;
  • manage stakeholders – involve the right people at the right moment;
  • analyze employee experience and identify team problems to solve;
  • make your team’s work measurable and thus impactful in the company.

Who is this workshop for

  • Newly promoted design leads, UX managers, heads of product design — simply saying, everyone who has just switched from an individual contributor to a managerial role;
  • Senior, lead, and principal designers considering a managerial career but unsure whether they’ll like it;
  • Experienced design leads who want to refresh their knowledge and socialize with peers.

About Slava

Slava Shestopalov is a design leader and public speaker. He has been working in managerial roles for the last 5 years and has written a number of articles on design leadership and team facilitation. He has experience working both in technology consultancies and digital product companies and leading hands-on designers as well as other design leads.

Slava spoke about design management at the Touch Summit 2023 in Tbilisi, Georgia, and was featured in a Smashing podcast episode about the challenges of switching to a leadership position.

To get a flavor of the upcoming workshops, feel free to check out some of Slava’s pieces on design leadership and related topics:

Time & Schedule

This workshop is split over four days. Our virtual doors open at 9:45, we start at 10 AM PT.

The workshop sessions will run on the following days:

  • Thu, November 30, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT (18:00 – 20:30 CET)
  • Fri, December 1, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT (18:00 – 20:30 CET)
  • Thu, December 7, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT (18:00 – 20:30 CET)
  • Fri, December 8, 09:00 – 11:30 AM PT (18:00 – 20:30 CET)

Schedule

Day 1 — Role scope

8:45 am PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introductions.

9:00 am – 11:00 am
Understanding and shaping your place in the company’s hierarchy and activities. Design management is an umbrella term, and there is no “standard” skillset or job description. We’ll analyze what a leadership position means in your context and how you can best apply your skills and time in your current or desired company.

11:00 am – 11:30 am
Q&A with Slava on the day’s material. Networking!

Day 2 — Stakeholder management

8:45 am PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introductions.

9:00 am – 11:00 am
Figuring out whom to collaborate with and how to do it right. Management is all about people, and it’s hard for newbie leaders to establish the right relationships with the right people. We’ll structure your stakeholder groups and define the optimal collaboration formats with each of them.

11:00 am – 11:30 am
Q&A with Slava on the day’s material. Networking!

Day 3 — Employee journey

8:45 am PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introductions.

9:00 am – 11:00 am
Gap and opportunity analysis. Your success as a manager is a sum of your team members’ successes. We’ll map the experiences of your new or potential subordinates and find stages where you can show maximum value and tackle the most critical problems.

11:00 am – 11:30 am
Q&A with Slava on the day’s material. Networking!

Day 4 — Building a system of UX goals

8:45 am PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introductions.

9:00 am – 11:00 am
Building a system of UX goals and matching them with the company’s business mission. The power of UX is massive, but sometimes ambiguous to non-designers. Something that is not properly measured doesn’t exist in the eyes of the leadership team; that’s why it’s essential to connect UX outcomes to general business outcomes. We’ll analyze how your company operates and how the design impacts its success.

11:00 am – 11:30 am
Q&A with Slava on the day’s material. Networking!

Unfortunately, this workshop is fully sold out! But you can join the waiting list in case a ticket becomes available:


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