Leading Design San Francisco has now passed. Check out our upcoming conferences, coaching programmes and retreats via leadingdesign.com.

SFJAZZ Center

San Francisco 2023

Leading Design San Francisco was a two day gathering of design leaders from some of the world's most innovative organisations. Brought to you by design transformation consultancy Clearleft.
Brought to you by

Leading Design was a world-class conference for people leading design teams, overseeing design direction, or striving to instil a culture of design within their organisations. Our past speakers have worked at Figma, Netflix, IBM Design Studio, Spotify and Google. For San Francisco 2023 we assembled a wonderful group of design leaders who covered a wide range of topics to help inspire participants on their own design leadership journey.

Three reasons to join us at Leading Design San Francisco

Learn from industry leaders

Our industry leading speakers share years of experience in finding talent, building culture, structuring and developing their teams, managing upwards, coping with stress, and maintaining personal wellbeing.

Connect with your peers

Design leadership can be hard; especially if you’ve not done it before. The best way to meet this challenge is through the support of your peers, so we create plenty of opportunities to meet like-minded design leaders, swap stories, and build relationships that we know will last.

Experience a unique programme

Most conferences are focussed on practitioners. We put together a unique programme of events designed specifically to hone your leadership skills. We believe that by the end of the conference we will have helped you tackle some of your most pressing challenges, enabling you to become the most effective design leader possible.

Past events

Leading Design has been running since 2016 with conferences, retreats, coaching and meetups to guide you through every stage of your leadership journey. Take a look at our past events.

The Venue

SFJAZZ Center

The first stand-alone structure in the country built specifically for jazz, the SFJAZZ Center was designed by award-winning San Francisco architect Mark Cavagnero, who worked with acoustician Sam Berkow and theater designer Len Auerbach to create a main performance space with the acoustic quality of a great concert hall and the relaxed intimacy of a jazz club.

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