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Design Leadership: 14 things best design leaders do
Learning from the industry’s best design practices
When hiring a product designer, companies look for critical skills that help them ship products without much hand-holding or even in record time. In addition, more and more companies are copying products from different markets and then modifying the concept for their local needs or reinventing the age-old concepts and pumping new life into dead topics. Either way, companies need stellar product design talent now more than ever. But having the best design talent on the planet is not nearly enough. You will also need to ‘manage’ this talent and grow design work that eventually drives this talented bunch.
I have only met a handful of great design leaders in my career so far, and unfortunately, a few of them I could only meet thru’ digital mediums and not in person. So here are the top qualities that design leaders at exceptional places display that more of us should start doing.
#1 Customer obsession
“We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.” — Jeff Bezos
Most product designers and managers will obsess over user needs by looking at…