Design Leadership Handbook
By Elijah Woolery and Aarron Walter
The Design Leadership Handbook is a practical guide for designers stepping into leadership roles, offering a clear roadmap for managing teams, scaling design operations, and shaping product vision. Drawing on real-world insights from design leaders at top companies like Netflix, Airbnb, Slack, Facebook, and Spotify, this book addresses the challenges of transitioning from individual contributor to design leader. Through engaging stories and actionable frameworks, it teaches how to build a high-performing team, manage with empathy, operationalize design processes, and influence across your organization.
Whether you’re leading your first team or scaling design at a growing company, this handbook will help you navigate leadership with confidence. You’ll learn how to hire and coach effectively, give and receive feedback, run design critiques and retrospectives, and partner cross-functionally. With examples from companies like 3M, Twitter, and Mailchimp, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their impact and build a resilient, visionary design practice.
Length: 73 pages
Available in PDF and epub formats, free for Design Better Premium subscribers
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What’s in Design Leadership Handbook
Becoming a design leader
This chapter explores the transition from designer to leader, showing how to navigate uncertainty, build confidence, and embrace new responsibilities beyond the craft of design.
Building the team
Learn how to hire thoughtfully, define team values, and structure your design org using proven strategies from companies like Airbnb, Facebook, and Mailchimp.
Managing a design team
Get your bearings on coaching, 1-on-1s, conflict resolution, and identifying team members’ strengths to help them thrive.
Operationalizing design
Learn how to establish scalable feedback systems, rituals like design critiques and retrospectives, and tools to help remote and co-located teams stay aligned.
Forging alliances
This chapter highlights the importance of cross-functional collaboration and how building rapport with partners in product, engineering, and beyond can amplify design’s impact.
Shaping design vision
Learn how to define and communicate a compelling design vision that inspires your team and aligns stakeholders across the company.
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When you become a Premium subscriber, not only will you get Design Leadership Handbook, you’ll also get our entire library of books that cover a range of essential topics and are written by top industry experts.
Design Leadership Handbook: Take your career further whether you aspire to lead or need to become a better one. This book will give you the foundation you need.
Design Systems Handbook: Learn to design, deploy, and drive adoption of a design system in your organization with this book written by experts from Github, Salesforce, Pinterest, Etsy, and Shopify.
Design Thinking Handbook: Informed by the Stanford methodology, this book provides the foundation for innovation and product design exploration.
Designing for Emotion: Learn how to design products that inspire trust, overcome user fears, and create lasting impressions with this classic that’s inspired teams at The White House, Intuit, Google, and more.
DesignOps Handbook: Written by DesignOps pioneers, this book is the essential guide to improving your team’s core operations so designers can focus on what they love most—design.
Principles of Product Design: There is a proven recipe for making great products, and this book lays it all out with real-world examples of the best design teams.
About the authors
Eli Woolery
Elijah trained in the Product Design program at Stanford University, where he now teaches as a lecturer. He has a background in photography and filmmaking, as well as product and industrial design. He is formerly the Director of Design Education at InVision, a software design and collaboration platform.
After working as a lead design engineer with Light & Motion, a vertically integrated manufacturer of consumer underwater video and photography equipment, he pursued graduate studies in marine biology at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, and co-founded the print magazine Wetpixel Quarterly in 2007. He was a founder in the second class of Innovation Endeavor's Runway Program, a venture-backed startup accelerator backed by Eric Schmidt's fund.
He also founded Out of the Deep Blue, a design consultancy, where he worked on web and mobile applications for clients like Genentech and Kaiser Permanente. As a life-long worshiper of the ocean, he loves to surf, dive, and kayak.
Aarron Walter
Aarron Walter is a design and technology leader, and co-host of the Webby-nominated Design Better Podcast. He founded the user experience practice at Mailchimp, helping the company grow from a few thousand users to tens of millions. At InVision, he led research into the inner workings of top design teams at companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Google to uncover what drives their success.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Aarron joined former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden at Resolve to Save Lives, applying design and technology to support emergency response efforts at the WHO, Africa CDC, and U.S. public health departments.
Aarron has advised the White House, the U.S. Department of State, and dozens of leading companies, startups, and venture capital firms.
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