Design Leadership Summit 2024
2024-01-29..2024-01-31
Toronto, Canada
[Design Leadership Summit 2018, Design Leadership Summit 2019, Design Leadership Summit 2022, Design Leadership Summit 2024, Design Leadership Summit 2025 (Nov)]
who it's for
design leaders, design managers, design operations leads, product design leads, design recruiters and talent partners, head of design, ux researchers
topics
agenda-driven change leadership; meetings as facilitation design; values-driven design practice; neurodiversity workplace accommodations; career ladder competency taxonomy; hiring and retention strategies; scaling design organizations; design metrics dashboard; enterprise AI ethics frameworks; content credentials and provenance; prompt engineering and safety
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Design Leadership Is Not Leading Design | Peter Merholz | 36m |
Argues design leadership is primarily a change-agent role with a concrete agenda, not just stewarding craft; prescribes tools like an explicit agenda, the… | ||
| I Love Good Meetings | Milena Tasic | 15m |
A practical playbook: clear claim that meetings fail because teams obsess over productivity and tools instead of audience and dynamics, actionable steps like… | ||
| Values-Driven Design | Levon Sharrow | 21m |
Reframes design leadership as making concrete choices: define, test‑drive and exercise specific values (curiosity, empathy, humor) to guide tradeoffs… | ||
| Operational lessons from "Atypical" brains | Nariman Gathers | 15m |
Claims three actionable practices and shows them working: when faced with three immaculate mocks and no decision, declaring constraints forces a choice —… | ||
| Oh, the places you’ll go! | Shelby Bower | 26m |
Redesigns a career ladder into ten clear competencies, extracts a ~150-skill taxonomy and maps skills to IC levels, and wires that into hiring and promotion… | ||
| Panel Discussion: Unseen lives of Design Leaders | Katrina Alcorn, Christina Goldschmidt, Levon Sharrow | 52m |
Claims about hiring, burnout and midlife crises get grounded in examples: a corporate pivot toward a Warner Music Group move to SaaS to monetize artist‑fan… | ||
| Humanizing Technology: Ethics and Design in the Age of AI | Katrina Alcorn | 25m |
Clear, testable claims and concrete tools: a vision AI company called Big Bear is used for national security; Kaiser Permanente reports about 500 deaths… | ||
| Panel Discussion: Scaling Design Teams | Stephen Boak, Kamdyn Moore, Aniruddha Kadam | 42m |
Specifics: 90 designers at Datadog in a 6,000-person company supporting 20 products with ~15 open roles, Spotify scaled to ~350 designers supporting ~5,000 R&D… | ||
| Metrics for Impact | Susanne Junglas, Sandra Griffel | 29m |
Provides a concrete, reusable metric framework: dream detail drive process, step‑by‑step canvases and metric cards that combine qualitative and quantitative… | ||
| Panel Discussion: AI Meets Design: A Dialogue | Emily Krause, Matthew Richmond, Kris Woyzbun, Karan Walia | 01h 00m |
Designers describe concrete deployments and limits: Adobe integrates content credentials and a provenance trail into Photoshop and Firefly, enterprises demand… | ||
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