Liftoff! Leadership Resources

This list isn’t exhaustive and does not include everything we cited or reference throughout Liftoff! (and there’s a lot!). Instead, we wanted to share a number of the links that that may be helpful to folks on their leadership journey that were important to our book.

Design Leadership Communities and Events

• InVision Design Leadership Forum
• Leadership by Design conference
• Leading Design Slack community,conferences, meet-ups, and retreats
• Design Leadership Summit conference and Slack community
• DesignOps Summit
• Design Dept. Slack community, workshops and coaching
• Within.co retreats, community, and magazine

Recent Design and Product Development Leadership books

• Making of a Manager by Julie Zhou
• Resilient Management by Lara Hogan
• The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier

Hiring: More Places to Diversify Your Candidate Pool

But there are still some more interesting places to either post design openings or browse through directories of diverse designers who may be interested in discussing your firm’s open positions. Let’s look at a few sites and how they describe themselves:

College and university career sites

If you’re looking for entry level to early career design positions and a degree is required, you can have a lot of success identifying undiscovered candidates here. Often, the posting is free, and you can also conduct individual candidate searches by major and year of graduation.

Latinxs Who Design

“Latinxs Who Design” is a living directory of thriving Latinxs in the design industry. Their mission is to provide a space to find outstanding people to follow, look for a mentor, make new friends, or discover talented individuals to join your team.

Blacks Who Design

“Blacks Who Design” highlights all of the inspiring Black designers in the industry. The goal is to inspire new designers, encourage people to diversify their feeds, and discover amazing individuals to join your team.

Women Who Design

“Women Who Design” is a Twitter directory of accomplished women in the design industry. It aims to help people find notable and relevant voices to follow on Twitter by parsing Twitter bios for popular keywords.

Queer Design Club

“Queer Design Club’s” mission is to promote and celebrate all the amazing work that happens at the intersection of queer identity and design worldwide—from LGBTQ+ designers’ contributions to the industry to design’s role in queer activism throughout history.

These directories provide an effective method of introducing you to people you may otherwise have never crossed paths with. But just blasting directories of people—whether from LinkedIn or one of the above community-focused services—won’t work if you’re not communicating the right message and tone to get people interested in learning more.