Leadership is just another
design problem.
Let’s solve it together.
“If you’re a design leader and you’re struggling to transition from maker to orchestrator, or your self-doubt is preventing you from showing up as your best self, or you just don’t even really know what it means to be a design leader, I urge you to sign up for coaching with Jesse. His deeply empathetic listening, pointed questions, and actionable insights not only helped me better understand and believe in myself, they also directly helped me add more value to my organization.”
I’ve been leading digital product design teams and advising executive design leaders for more than 20 years—as a consultant, agency founder, and in-house leader. I’ve seen organizations of all kinds from the inside out, from huge multinational companies all the way down to small community organizations. Today, I apply all of that experience to one-on-one coaching with design executives, helping them develop the skills to lead with greater purpose, intention, and creativity.
Less noise, more signal.
Less reaction, more intention.
If you’ve decided it’s time to stop trying to find your place within someone else’s vision—and time to start defining and moving towards a vision of your own—working with me can help you get clarity on your long-term objectives and turn them into actionable near-term tactics.
Congratulations, you’re in charge—now what?
Every design leader faces a new level of challenge when they become the head of design. To the business, you’re the face of design as a function, and its fate in the organization is now bound to your own. Within the design team, you’re now managing other managers, with their own needs for power and autonomy. And both are looking at you as if to ask: Whose side are you on?
Finding your own authentic leadership style
Many become executive design leaders without ever having had good mentors or models for effective leadership—but lots of negative examples they’d like to avoid. Conflicting advice from management gurus who don’t understand the particular needs of design leaders can only confuse things more. Getting clear on how to lead means getting clear on your own strengths, and optimizing for them.
Building solid partnerships and healthy teams
Engaging the leaders around you is essential for any design leader’s success, and for executives it can be critical. Your team’s effectiveness relies on your ability to develop trust and goodwill across the organization, not just within your team. But your designers need your help as well, to develop the team cohesion and resilience necessary to take on the unknown and unexpected together.
Using your superpowers for growth
Too many design leaders feel they have to leave their creative selves behind when they reach the executive suite. Working together in a series of private one-on-one sessions over a 6-month coaching program, we’ll tap into the creative spirit that enables your growth and success, and take the steps needed to make them real.
Satisfied clients. Real results.
People love both the process of working with me and the changes it can create in their lives. Here are just a few quotes from my clients:
Experiencing Jesse’s sustained focus and listening in our regular 1-on-1 sessions was life-changing. Receiving his perspective on my day-to-day life as a design professional was just a bonus. I’ll continue learning from our time together for decades to come.
Jesse is an incredibly supportive and thoughtful coach who leads with empathy and heart. I left our sessions feeling both seen and heard. He helped me identify key blockers to achieving my goals and adjust my mindset and strategies to tackle them.
The impact of Jesse’s coaching has had real results – I’m being recognized at work, and suddenly finding myself influencing a cultural shift at my organization in just a few short months.
As a coach, Jesse was supportive, but challenged me in a way that inspired me to go beyond my comfort zone, and he provided actionable feedback that built up my confidence and trust within myself.
Book your free Exploration Session
In this free one-hour session for potential clients, we’ll explore your situation and your goals together to discover how coaching can help you achieve them. (All sessions conducted over Zoom.)
Jesse has some sort of sixth sense for leadership situations. Through a single conversation he was able to untangle a bunch of disparate symptoms, insightfully put things in order, and guide me to a diagnosis of a months-long issue. This uncovered a clear path to a solution and was probably the most productive hour of the entire year!
I’m bringing a greater sense of purpose, direction, and boldness into the work I do, something I look forward to carrying with me throughout my career.
Jesse always made me feel supported and heard. He helped me through many things, including a difficult transition in my team. He brought his experience to situations that I was dealing with for the first time. Jesse’s guidance helped me feel less alone when it comes to the things that are important to me.
Latest writings on design leadership
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Leading design for AI
I’m fascinated by the emerging challenges I’m seeing among my coaching clients who are leading design for AI products. Some of them are leading new AI features within established product offerings. Others are taking brand new AI products from zero to one. And some of them have been working in the space for a while…
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Strategic stakeholder empathy: Christina Goldschmidt on Finding Our Way
For many design professionals, empathy can feel so reflexive it’s hardly a choice. It’s often our instinctive desire to solve a problem for someone else that draws us to design in the first place. But if the phrase “stakeholder empathy” gives you the heebie-jeebies, well, I don’t blame you. It brings to mind images of…
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Establishing credibility as a new leader: Rebecca Nordstrom on Finding Our Way
When you’re a new design leader creating a new design function for an existing organization, establishing your credibility and authority can be challenging. Some leaders choose to lobby at the top, seeking an executive mandate they can wield to bend their partners to their processes. In my experience, though, this approach creates so much potential…
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Design leaders in transition
It’s a sign of the times. I’m coaching a lot of design leaders lately who are making big transitions: moving towards different roles, different organizations, different mandates, and different ways of delivering value and finding satisfaction in their work. Some of them are choosing to find a way out of their orgs—while others are being…
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Design’s “Little Sister” problem: Cynthia Savard Saucier on Finding Our Way
Throughout my career, UX design has been the underdog: perpetually misunderstood, left out, pushed around, denied credit, and always the least influential and most ignored voice in the room. And when I coach design leaders, many of their aspirations revolve around finding a way to change that equation. I thought of these aspirations while talking…
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Airbnb’s missing leg of the stool
Many of you probably remember Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky’s sweeping declaration at last year’s Config that he had eliminated the traditional product management function in favor of giving more authority to designers. But if you were busy over the holidays, you might have missed his followup conversation on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast. I found what he said there…
Bio
Jesse James Garrett has been one of the most prominent voices in digital product design for more than 20 years. His career highlights include co-founding the groundbreaking UX consultancy, Adaptive Path; writing the foundational book The Elements of User Experience, whose iconic five-plane model has become a staple of the field; and defining Ajax, the dynamic interaction model that transformed web technology and design in the Web 2.0 era. His work has been published in more than a dozen languages and he is a frequent keynote speaker on making designers and organizations more human-centered in their work.
Finding Our Way
Finding Our Way is the new design leadership podcast from Jesse James Garrett and Peter Merholz, co-founders of Adaptive Path.
Jesse James Garrett 