Staff design is a combination of team leadership and in-the-pixels design work, all without managing direct reports. This handbook will guide you to success—whether you’re already navigating a staff design role, or you’re deciding if you should embark on the journey. You’ll learn to build influence with soft power, improve your communication, and impact strategy at scale.

Who Should Read This Book

This book was written for UX practitioners who are considering the staff design role, including:

• Senior designers who want to get promoted to the staff level by identifying and filling their competency gap.
• UX practitioners who want to learn about the role before choosing between hands-on and management paths. 

It’s also incredibly helpful for staff designers in need of new tactics to shift from reactive to proactive, build influence, and become the leader they want to be.

Takeaways

• Learn what the difference is between a staff designer and a senior designer.
• Compare the duties of a staff designer in a small, medium, and large company settings.
• Make time for visioning and planning projects while you set healthy boundaries.
• Create and drive a product vision.
• Know how to build influence without authority. 
• Scale your impact and prove your value as a staff designer.

Staff design is a combination of team leadership and in-the-pixels design work, all without managing direct reports. This handbook will guide you to success—whether you’re already navigating a staff design role, or you’re deciding if you should embark on the journey. You’ll learn to build influence with soft power, improve your communication, and impact strategy at scale.

Who Should Read This Book

This book was written for UX practitioners who are considering the staff design role, including:

• Senior designers who want to get promoted to the staff level by identifying and filling their competency gap.
• UX practitioners who want to learn about the role before choosing between hands-on and management paths. 

It’s also incredibly helpful for staff designers in need of new tactics to shift from reactive to proactive, build influence, and become the leader they want to be.

Takeaways

• Learn what the difference is between a staff designer and a senior designer.
• Compare the duties of a staff designer in a small, medium, and large company settings.
• Make time for visioning and planning projects while you set healthy boundaries.
• Create and drive a product vision.
• Know how to build influence without authority. 
• Scale your impact and prove your value as a staff designer.

The digital world is transitioning from text to media: photos, audio files, video clips, animations, games, and more. Enterprises of all kinds struggle with how to manage those media assets. Digital professionals who want to master the life cycles behind creating, storing, and reusing media need the inside scoop on how digital and media asset management technology really works.

Conventional product development focuses on the solution. Empathy is a mindset that focuses on people, helping you to understand their thinking patterns and perspectives. Practical Empathy will show you how to gather and compare these patterns to make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.

Information is easy. Understanding is hard.

From incomprehensible tax policies to confusing medical explanations, we're swamped with information that we can'’t make sense of. Figure It Out shows us how to transform information into better presentations, better meetings, better software, and better decisions. So take heart: under the guidance of Anderson and Fast, we can, in fact, figure it out—for ourselves and for others.