2020 Pre-Conference Workshop
Topic(s): coaching, communication, leadership, management, and professional development
Description
Giving feedback is a crucial skill for IA and UX leaders in order to help their teams grow and develop valuable self-perception. Yet many managers lack confidence in their coaching skills and feel uncomfortable giving constructive feedback to their direct reports. Whether due to a lack of training or hands-on experience, this is the part of managing that leaders often dread. In addition, coaching information architects, UX designers, and other design practitioners involves giving in-depth direction on particular skill sets which generalized leadership trainings don’t cover.
In this workshop, I will help IA and UX leaders to go beyond the basics and learn the nuances of effective coaching and feedback specific to our profession. I will introduce the Growth Framework, a tool that I developed to assist in my coaching conversations with designers, which participants will use during the workshop and can take home with them.
This workshop is best suited for team leads or people managers. Some knowledge of the basics of managing and feedback will help attendees (for example, experience having one-on-one sessions with direct reports, or facilitating design feedback sessions). Participants who have a basic understanding of these skills will be able to go into more depth during the workshop as they will be able to come up with real-world situations that they can use during role play. Those without any experience managing, however, will also be able to participate, and individual contributors who give feedback to others as a part of their role will find the tips and methods I describe applicable in their day to day job.
About the speaker(s)
Jenny has been working as a designer since 2005 and has led UX teams in multiple startups and enterprise software companies, including Citrix and Splunk in San Francisco, and Trustpilot in Copenhagen, Denmark. As a consultant, she helps companies build better products through facilitating design workshops, creating and testing early stage product designs, and coaching individual designers. Since 2014 she has also introduced undergraduate students to her love of design by teaching UX courses at California College of the Arts and University of California Berkeley.