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Time and Boundaries
- I can really recommend Make Time. It’s not a “productivity” book, but one about making time for things that are important in your life. And putting friction back into things that sap your time.
- Seth Godin’s The Dip is a short read, and worth buying. On the point of starting many things and giving up, The Dip is all about when to make the choice to continue or quit.
- If you have a bit more reading time, Cal Newport’s Deep Work is pretty good too.
OKRs
- OKRs That Don’t Suck - Good video from Adrian Howard.
- What Is An OKR? Here Are The Basics
- How To Use OKRs To Set Goals For Your Professional And Personal Development
- The main reference book on them is Christina Wodtke’s Radical Focus.
- Christina’s The Art of the OKR, Redux
- A recent post on Are You Sure You Want to Use OKRs?
- Also from Christina: Why key results need to be results
- What is an OKR? Definition and examples by Ryan Panchadsaram and Sam Prince
Impact & ethics
- Here’s that UX example of flight booking – someone from Fjord made this, but I’m not sure who.
- Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Design leadership
- Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc. is an excellent book on leading creative organisations.
- Dave Gray’s Selling to the VP of No is a little-known, but excellent little book on understanding how to get through to corporate execs.
- Lift Off! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You
- Business Thinking for Designers (free from InVision) by Ryan Rumsey (also a guest on my podcast here).
- Design Leadership Handbook by Aarron Walter and Eli Woolery (free from InVision)
- Managing Chaos - Digital Governance by Design is a great book by Leisa Welchman about this idea of getting your governance in place when you’re small, because later you wont have time. She was on my podcast here if you prefer to listen instead of read.
Impostor syndrome and procrastination
- Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones isn’t really so much about writing. It’s a very good book about turning off the inner critic and “letting yourself write shit” as a way to get to the good stuff. There’s an interview with her about the book 30 years on.
- Almost everything by James Hollis
- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
- The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
- Tim Urban’s procrastination series on Wait But Why:
- There’s a very good book by Jungian analyst called Owning Your Own Shadow.
Design Process
- Principles.Design is an open-source resource of various designers’ and companies’ design principles.
- Design Ops
- Design Ops Structures
- Design Ops 101
- F.I.R.E. by Dan Ward.
Product
- Continuous Discovery - Teresa Torres
- The Build Trap - Melissa Perri
- Outcomes over Outputs - Josh Seiden
- Even Over statements – couple of articles on them here and here
- Forced ranking is usually a group thing, but you can do it alone. Here’s a description from Gamestorming.
- Product Management for UX People has just come out, might be useful
Roadmaps
- C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, Michael Connors, 2017, Product Roadmaps Relaunched, O’Reilly.
- Avoid roadmapping pitfalls by focusing on problems, not solutions by Chris Butler.
- Themes: A Small Change to Product Roadmaps with Large Effects by Jared Spool.
- Adrian Howard again on moving from conversations about time/effort to conversations about value/decomposition/WIP
Strategy
- Rumelt, Richard. (2011). Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters, Currency.
Pitching & Presenting
- Presenting Design Work by Donna Spencer
- Pixar in a Box
Building Teams & the VP role
- Peter Merholz wrote a good article on The Makeup of a Design Executive (Chief Design Officer, S/VP of Design)
- The biggest development issue I see in design leadership today.
- Jason Mesut has a bunch of articles on Medium that he is near the end of putting into a book. Check out Shaping Design and Framing Design Leadership.
- And here’s that article by Neo’s Gif Constable that I mentioned. Check out the the Google sheet matrix he links to as well.
- It’s not quite the same and more focused on the craft than the business, but here is Why You Should Hire a VP of User Experience Design.
- I already linked to Peter Merholz’s other article, but he also wrote the book, Org Design for Design Orgs and has an article there about defining the Head of Design roel. This pre-dates his other piece by several years, though.
- Leah Buley had a couple of great points to make about who the VP/Head of reports to and the difference it makes to the business while she was still at InVision and did their Design Maturity Index. Here is a Twitter thread and here is the original of that material.
- A piece by Jehad Affoneh about The difference between a VP of Design and a VP of anything else.
- Pixar’s 7 Core Principles for Building a Creative Culture
- Think like Pixar: 7 business lessons from the studio’s creative culture – Wired
- Ed Catmull: Creativity, Inc. - talk by Ed about the book.
- Work Differently from GravityTank.
- 5 Steps For Creating The Perfect Team - Brandon Klein in Fast Company
- What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times
- Why psychological safety matters and what to do about it via re:Work
- Understand team effectiveness via re:Work
- Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind by Nancy Kline
- How Great Leaders Serve Others by David Marquet at TEDx