Managing a Design Team

This session will explore how a design team can be set up, grown, scaled and motivated.

There are a lot of myths and misconceptions on how design teams can be managed: designers are creative people who need to be left alone, designers are too wild to work in a normal work environment, designers need to be kept in a short leash, etc, etc. Well, those myths were probably created by mediocre managers. And that probably fuelled the first misconception that managers and designers don't get along very well.

I do not claim to hold the ultimate truth on this topic, but I think I can provide an interesting (and international) viewpoint on how managing a design team can work after working in creative teams in 6 different countries and managed over a hundred different designers. Hopefully this can help existing designers manage their relationship with other designers better, or help customers who engage with designers have more meaningful relationships.