Design Management: Create, Develop, and Lead Effective Design Teams

Designers are more in-demand than ever, and companies worldwide are creating new leadership roles to manage them. With only a few select institutions teaching effective design management practices, self-taught designers are on the rise, and resources are needed to guide them. Design Management is here to hone your capacity to manage like a leader and magnify your team’s potential, demonstrating how to combine managerial and leadership competencies leveraging neuroscience, psychology, and sociology notions.

This book will help eager designers learn the behavioral abilities required to create, lead and manage high-performing design teams using a systemic, context-agnostic, and therefore repeatable approach. While effective design management is vital in these times of complexity and fast change in organizations, the available literature is insufficient, predominately informative, not based on research, and not actionable. Design Management fills that gap by illuminating the skills you need to lead your team to success.

Come away from Design Management with confidence about how to manage like a leader leveraging different leadership mindsets to nurture creative collaboration and optimize the design operations. Whether you are a designer preparing for the first leadership role or an already established design manager intentioned to expand attitudinal and behavioral competencies, this book belongs on your shelf. Design Management is here to assist you in the long haul.

Andrea Picchi is Head of Design at Kroo, leveraging human-centered design to build the world’s first social bank. With a background in cognitive psychology and computer science, he subsequently learned design thinking at the Hasso Platter d.school at Stanford University and studied its business applications at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Andrea developed his leadership and management knowledge working with and for companies such as Apple, Google, Samsung, Sony, and Nokia. His research in human-computer interaction has been used to develop patents for products such as Google Glass, and in the past decade, he has been building, leading, and managing successful teams that created products and services used by millions of people worldwide.