Author: Jesse James Garrett
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Creativity, leadership, and love
You’ve got to fall in love with something to do great creative product work. Fall in love with the problem. With the complexity and difficulty of framing a need and defining success. Fall in love with the user. With the hopes and wishes and struggles they carry, large or small. Fall in love with the…
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Leadership performance and the coaching advantage: Amy Lokey on Finding Our Way
When does a leader turn to outside support to strengthen themselves? How do they know when they need it? This was one of the key topics that came up as Peter Merholz and I talked with Amy Lokey about her ascent to Chief Experience Officer for ServiceNow on the latest episode of our design leadership…
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Making change through design (and) leadership: Sara Beckman on Finding Our Way
Being an agent of change is often part of the point of the job for design leaders. They got into design to change products; they got into leadership to change organizations. But the path to that change—process change, culture change, mindset change—is anything but a straight line, according to Berkeley business school professor Sara Beckman…
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Leading design success across functions: Todd Wilkens on Finding Our Way
In my coaching practice, I meet a lot of design leaders who yearn for the authority to drive user-centered practices not just for their own teams, but across their cross-functional partners. With that kind of power, a leader could truly empower design to deliver on its potential, right? But what does it actually take to…
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Ajax at 20
It’s easy to forget how different the web was 20 years ago. Web pages were static things, rendered once and forever. Nothing moved or changed on the web, unless it was an animated GIF. Nothing was dynamic, nothing was real-time, nothing was live, except whatever was supported by this optional extension or that. JavaScript was…
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Be the anomaly: Roger L. Martin on Finding Our Way
We’ve had a lot of intellectually expansive conversations on Finding Our Way over the years, but our latest episode with business strategist Roger Martin might be the first to merit its own reading list. So here’s a quick rundown of some of the works referenced in our conversation: As you can see, we really covered…
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Living up to a design legacy: Peter Skillman on Finding Our Way
In a world full of “zero-to-one” leaders, stepping into ownership of a century-old legacy is a completely different kind of leadership challenge. Peter Skillman is the latest design leader to take on that challenge for Philips, and his insights on the latest episode of our design leadership podcast Finding Our Way have meaningful implications even…
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Setting expectations with partners: Audrey Crane on Finding Our Way
When I left my last in-house role, I realized how much I had missed the broad perspective that comes from working as a consultant. It can be so easy as an in-house leader to get caught up in in-house perspectives, in-house thinking, and even in-house language that frames both our problems and their potential solutions.…
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Junior talent, strategic ambitions: Gaurav Mathur on Finding Our Way
India has been a powerhouse in software engineering for decades, but it’s only in recent years that Indian schools have started producing large numbers of qualified digital product designers. As a result, senior Indian designers with the experience to drive high-value design work can be difficult or impossible to hire on the open market. For…
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Storytelling at end-of-year
It’s end-of-year performance review time in a lot of organizations and for many of the leaders in my coaching practice, storytelling is front and center. Here’s some perspective on the story you tell at end of year from the leaders I work with: 📈 It’s not just a story about how you’ve made your team…
Jesse James Garrett 