Why do some design teams soar while others struggle to make progress? Introducing the Four Fits for Design Org Value. A comprehensive framework for growing design value by addressing model, practice, partnership, and positioning alignment.

When you lead Design people, teams, and the organization, the most significant shift is knowing that most of your colleagues don't think about design as a craft or practice. They think about it as a group of people with specific skills and capabilities with a budget… essentially a big pile of "features". Yes, they want to know how these "features" help customers, but they really want to know how those "features" also help them.

Christina Goldschmidt, VP and Head of Product Design at Etsy, on how she creates repeatable systems through brain hacking, has learned to give things away, maintains her core self, and much more.

Hiya! I'm Carolina Tod. Working with product design in Brazil for at least 15 years, I learned to appreciate more things from abroad than my own. This fact made me compare myself with others with different experiences, backgrounds, and life stories than mine, leaving me constantly stuck. It’s important I reconnect with ancestry, culture, city, and community to build confidence.

If you’re a design leader who has taken the management career path, you've likely thought about getting a new gig, and you've probably thought about "standing out." Standing out is really important, but being told that probably isn’t very useful to figuring out how. Let’s talk about differentiating yourself in the job market as a design leader

The new home for Second Wave Dive’s renowned courses and learning programs. We’ve completely revamped everything for 2023.

There is nothing to prepare you for the first time you find out your boss has been fired. When you start to see signals, it’s important to notice them, then make deliberate decisions about what you’re going to do about them.

Learn two analytical frameworks, SWOT and SOAR, that are great for highlighting the pros and cons of different decisions and solutions.

Learn the storytelling structure used across the world to influence business decisions: the Situation Complication Resolution (SCR) framework.

Learn a dialogue script to practice active listening with your colleagues to ask for small behavior changes.

If you want to try new things, build a case of evidence that those things work, and are looking to find yourself an executive sponsor, use our free Stakeholder Mapping canvas.

When you're working on products in any other setting, there are four issues I see coming up time and time again that OKRs aren't effectively addressing.

IMO, the biggest development issue in design leadership today is that many Design VPs still think and act like Managers/Directors. Your teams, customers, & you deserve better.

Over the last 20+ years, many companies have implemented (or tried to) OKRs with varying degrees of success. There are some clear patterns around what is and isn't working.

POKRs stands for perspectives, objectives and key results. This framework is all about adding the quality factors that different individuals or teams think about when making decisions so they can make sense to each other.

When you’re trying to decide on who to trust with your development, it’s critical to know who you’re working with. Here are all the reasons to learn with us and and what we’re good at.

Within an organization, a lack of consistency for what is desirable puts designers and design teams into difficult situations. Strategy Maps are the bridge you need to connect design to business.

Use the storytelling structure used by executives across the world to sell your argument. Download The Situation Complication Resolution Canvas template for Mural. Use this template to create a predictable and focused structure for explaining your rationale.

Hey designers, while you're consumed with finding the right metric, you should know a few pragmatic realities of putting a metric in place. Here's what I've learned over the years.

Second Wave Dive is a foundational school for the next wave of Design Executives. We help you claim your agency, shape policy and people (not pixels), and exceed the expectations of others and yourself.