Speakers
Chris Avore
Design manager, Speaker, and Author
Chris is a design leader with extensive experience managing and scaling design teams in large organizations, startups, and agencies. He helps businesses and teams thrive by adopting customer-centric design and product development practices to grow and improve their impact. He is the co-author of Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You (Rosenfeld Media 2020).
He previously advised design teams of such world-class organizations as Netflix, frog, Boeing, and Verizon while at InVision. Before that, Chris led the design and user experience organization at Nasdaq, where he scaled the practice from serving one line of business to the entire enterprise over 7 years.
Masterclasses
Designing Design Teams (Part 1): Crafting the Pipeline
Building high performing teams is one of the most important responsibilities for design leaders. But the task of finding the best candidates to join your team may leave you feeling overwhelmed and underprepared.
This masterclass examines how to strategically design almost every facet of the recruiting process leading up to the interview. Even if you work for a large organization with a fully staffed recruiting team or go it alone in a startup or agency, we’ll uncover how the most effective design managers influence and support recruiting practices to be fast and successful.
We’ll discuss tips, approaches and techniques to create an environment that reduces bias, creates efficient, fair screening, and reflects a healthy, psychologically safe environment that the best candidates will want to join as they begin the hiring process. We’ll review effective job descriptions and what sets them apart, and how to engage designers who may not be looking until they hear from you. We’ll also be sure to include ample time for discussion so all participants have ample opportunity to learn from and share with each other.
Now sold out
Designing Design Teams (Part 2): The Intentional Interview & Offer Playbook
Crafting a diverse talent pool of warm and cool candidates with varying skills and backgrounds does not mean the design manager’s mission to grow the team is close to complete. This masterclass examines the work that begins after you start booking interviews.
We’ll discuss what questions should be in your interview script and how to objectively score responses, being careful to check both bias and slick talk. We’ll also investigate reviewing portfolios and spend time discussing design exercises, why they’re problematic, and what to do if your organization insists on assigning activities before a decision. We’ll also uncover what signals to look for to give you high conviction when interviewing team members ranging from independent contributors to managers. We’ll also complete the funnel by discussing how to make fair, competitive and equitable offers when you’ve made your decision.
Participants will have numerous opportunities to share what has worked well and what to avoid from their own experiences in our 90 minutes together.
Now sold out
Design Leadership Liftoff! The Masterclass
This masterclass explores the 3 pillars of Chris Avore and Russ Unger’s 2020 book Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate your Team, Your Organization, and You. In 90 minutes, Chris will guide discussions and activities around developing your team both by assessing their skills and behaviors, and then by examining the career ladders they will climb. Then we’ll look into how to develop your organization’s awareness of design, and discuss how to improve design maturity at the cross-functional and executive level. Lastly, we’ll look inward and take a self-reflective analysis of participants’ accomplishments and determine the underlying story that could shape their own portfolios(!) and their future paths in leadership.