And when did you last have a coffee with them? At this year’s Design Leadership Retreat, we did a very simple exercise: a classic stakeholder matrix. I thought this method was widely known, but many participants had never done it, and it led to an interesting reflection. Place your stakeholders Read more…
When does a design team actually need DesignOps (or a similar supporting role)? I hear this question a lot from design leaders and it was also a topic at this year’s Design Leadership Retreat. Large design organizations usually treat DesignOps as a given. Small and medium sized teams wait too Read more…
As part of my masterclasses of the 2025 Leadership Ateliers in Lisbon and Berlin, we ran a live, interactive session with 73 design leaders to surface the most pressing leadership challenges they face.
As part of my research, I’ve been diving into the topic of how you can benchmark your design team. After all having a solid understanding of your status-quo is necessary to know where you should improve.
I had the pleasure of being a guest on the German podcast “Lead UX” with Dr. Thomas Vöhringer-Kuhnt. We discussed the Design Leadership Framework and how to effectively apply it within companies and teams. Listen to the episode here. Hi, I’m Katharina Koberdamm, Design Consultant and Coach. I created the Read more…
When I first picked up Marzia Aricò’s recent book Design Leadership Chronicles, I was intrigued by its unique format—a graphic novel exploring design leadership through case studies. I was curious to see how she’d translate complex leadership topics into a visual narrative. Spoiler: it works surprisingly well.
Leading a design team is a complex, multifacetted task. The Design Leadership Framework describes five key areas that design leaders have to address to build a company’s design capability: Strategy, Experience, Operations, Enterprise and Team. In this article we will take a closer look at the area of Strategy.
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