Courses · · 2 min read

Find Your Executive Champions

A design leadership course to prioritize the work that has the biggest potential for impact with the stakeholders who will be your advocate when you're not in the room.

Find Your Executive Champions

Overview

Simultaneously connect the work your team thinks is important to do with the ideal collaborators who will help that work come to life. At the same time, learn who to spend your emotional energy with while continuing to provide value to those who challenge you most.

In this course, you’ll identify the ideal partners to validate and scale good ideas with, and when you manage your emotional energy.

  • Identify Your Opportunities
  • Find Your Product, Engineering, and Stakeholder Allies
  • Choose Your Executive Champions
  • Manage Your Emotional Energy

Who is this for?

Design Managers, Design Directors, Design Executives

Program goal

Map the assumptions you want to test and the things you want to do more with the collaborators and stakeholders who are most willing to try new things. Learn a simple matrix-like tool to know when delegating or reusing previous solutions is the best path forward.

Topics Covered

The VSDR Grid

Learn a simple matrix-like tool to focus on simultaneously delegating and reusing and validating and selling key aspects of your work to prioritize the best opportunities for impact.

Sidekicks, Challengers, and Champions

Find the stakeholders who will advocate for design when designers aren’t in the room and work with sidekicks on “less visible” projects to work on to build case studies of success. For those who challenge you most, learn how to prioritize your emotional energy while continuing to meet goals.

The Design Priority Matrix

Refashion your backlog by concentrating on four distinct actions—reduce, eliminate, raise, and create. Developed by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, these categories help you to challenge industry "best practices" to arrive at the best decisions for you and your teams.

Stakeholder Mapping

Strategically select the partners who will help you create great outcomes for your customers. Quickly map who has power/influence in your workplace and who is willing to experiment with new ways of working.


Meet your Instructor

Ryan Rumsey

For 20+ years, Ryan worked as a designer and executive at Apple, Electronic Arts, USAA, Nestlé, and Comcast. He is also the author of Business Thinking for Designers.

Ryan spent 10+ years as the senior design leader charged with building and scaling design organizations.

For the last four years, Ryan has been teaching design executives, leaders, and teams as CEO of Second Wave Dive and lead instructor of CDO School.

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