In this insightful session, Jesse James Garrett, a visionary in the field, delves into the intricacies of design leadership amidst the dynamic interplay between executive expectations and team aspirations. He reflects on the evolution of design leadership, the spectrum of design maturity, and provides a nuanced understanding of navigating leadership responsibilities.

Balancing Needs and Expectations:

• Acknowledgment of design leaders as a unique bunch, learning on the job due to a lack of formal education in design leadership.
• The "design leadership playbook" is an amalgamation of trials, errors, successes, and failures over the last two decades.
• Importance of translating the value proposition of design not only to the design team but to the larger organization.

Reconciling Product Success with Design Maturity:

• Questioning the long-term goal of design maturity and emphasizing that it should lead to greater product success visible to people outside design.
• Design maturity described as an asymptotic approach towards perfection that can never be reached, thus requiring realistic goal-setting.

Misunderstood Executive Motivations:

• Highlighting designers’ potential misinterpretations of executive motivations, especially regarding financial and quantitative aspects.
• Advocating for more empathy and attunement towards those who do not share the designerly way of seeing things.

Navigating Tough Decisions:

• Discussing the delicate balance between being responsible and being compassionate when making tough decisions.
• Encouraging design leaders to clarify their mandates and align their change-making goals with organizational expectations.

Notable Quotes:

• "Leadership is the art of disappointing people at a rate they can handle." - quoted by Chicago Camps from Carmen Medina’s Tent Talk session.
• "Design maturity is not an end in itself... It has to add up to something more that is visible to people outside design."
• "If your boss is like, I thought I hired you to build me a function to keep this dev engine fed with front end assets. And you're all, I came here to create systemic organizational and cultural change to drive a revolution of human-centered thinking across the company. Yeah, you're going to have a disconnect."

Chicago Camps hosts irregularly scheduled Tent Talks with people from all across the User Experience Design community, and beyond. Who really likes limits, anyway--If it's a cool idea, we'd love to hear about it and share it!

What is a Tent Talk? That's a great question, we'd love to tell you.

Tent Talks are short-form in nature, generally lasting from 10-20 minutes (ish) in a recorded format--we like to think of them as "S'mores-sized content" because that's pretty on-brand. Tent Talks can be a presentation on a topic, a live Q&A session about the work we do, or the work around the work we do, or really just about anything--we don't want to limit ourselves, or you.

You should send along an idea or topic of your own so we can learn from you, as well! You don't have to be a published author or a professional speaker on a circuit to be good at your job, so please, put yourself forward, and let's have some fun, talk, and share your experience with others!