Management - 👋 My Name Is Jehad

Scaling design teams and design recruiting

One of the most challenging roles a design leader plays is scaling a team. The way you get to help shape the culture and execution of dozens or hundreds of people is one of the most rewarding things you can do. As part of that, one of the most important

Management

Your guide to resourcing discussions as a design manager

Budgeting and resourcing discussions are difficult conversations for most design managers. It’s hard for multiple reasons. First, nobody really prepares you for it. With engineering management, as an example, there is a need to have this resourcing conversation with the engineering team because their ability to deliver is critical

Management

Using a decision making framework: a deep dive into RAPID®

I’ve been thinking a lot about operational efficiency and how to build more efficient organizations lately. The velocity of decision making in an organization is at the core of how efficient that organization is overall. If you combine the velocity of decision making with the clarity and accountability required

Leadership

The lonely leader and compassion fatigue

Over the years, a common theme I’ve seen leaders across the industry talk about is the phenomenon of the lonely leader. Most leaders I talk to either feel or have felt at some point in their career, especially early in leadership journey, that their experience as a leader is

Leadership

Empathy at work

In design, we often call out empathy as one of the core skills a designer needs to have in order to deeply understand their customers and hands on users. To develop empathy, we spend hours with our customers in their environments to understand the pressures they’re under, the pain

Management

The five elements to good management: ask, listen, take action, empower, and follow up

There isn’t one magic recipe for management. There are many of recipes. The challenge with giving advise to managers, especially in design, is the changing environment in which managers operate. Different environments require different styles of management at different times. Different people have different personalities and imposing a single

Design

Building our product design career development framework

Note that this article focuses on our individual contributor career development framework. With a fast-growing team, building a robust career framework becomes a necessity. The goal of our framework is to facilitate ongoing conversations between a product designer and their manager about achievements, motivations, blockers/constraints, and development opportunities. These

Leadership

Building psychological safety into the core of a team’s culture

One of the most important aspects of any team is its culture. When teams grow, culture is generally a representation of what people believe the culture to be instead of what leadership might want the culture to be. For example, although the leadership team might want an open and inclusive

Thoughts

Few questions to ask before preparing your next work presentation

Over the past few years, I’ve been spending a bigger portion of my time either presenting or listening to presentations. The topics of these presentations are different and no single style of presentation is best for all contexts, audiences, and environments. That said, I have learned a few tips

Leadership

Productivity, not activity. How I try to ensure I am focusing on the right priorities.

A few months ago, I had a conversation with a designer on my team about managing her work. She was subtly hinting to me that she’s overwhelmed with the level of work she’s been handed and is trying to figure out how to manage it. As we went

Design

Building your team's skills matrix

A couple of years ago, we began a movement to transform design at VMware and with it, transform VMware itself into an experience-led company. Anybody who’s been a part of a transformation would tell you that the most important part of a transformation is people. How you transform the

Design

Lead with context

In design, context is key. When we design workflows and products, especially complex ones, we focus on providing the necessary context to users in order to help them make the right decisions at the right time. Without a way to predict every single user scenario, providing context becomes a key

Management

Ask for your next promotion

This article will probably land a few more emails in my inbox over the coming weeks and months, but here we go. The more conversations I have with design leaders, individual contributors, and even design managers, the more I am reminded how much of what I know today as a

Management

Leaders are great at one of three: Vision, Operations, or Coaching

I ran into a tweet the other day that said most leaders are generally great at one of three things: vision, operations, or coaching. Few leaders are great at two, and you can rarely find one that is good at all three. Thinking about it, this has been true throughout

Leadership

Delegating work

One of the hardest skills to learn as a new manager moving from an individual contributor (IC) role is how to delegate. How to use the power of a team to achieve more. Delegation by its nature is a hard task. There is a balance between being absent as a