2026
/
Workshop
As design leaders step into roles with greater scope and responsibility, the challenge often shifts from doing great design to creating the conditions for great design to happen. This workshop is designed for new and emerging design leaders who want to scale their impact by bringing structure, clarity, and intention to how their teams operate. The session positions design operations as a core leadership capability, not a support function or an afterthought. Participants will explore how ops can be used to diagnose organisational barriers that limit effectiveness, such as unclear decision making, misaligned priorities, missing rituals, or gaps in capability. Rather than adding more process, the workshop focuses on understanding what truly enables teams to do good work and how leaders can remove friction in practical, sustainable ways.
Who is it for?
Anyone new to leadership who needs some frameworks to help them navigate the challenges and identify the opportunities for them to make a broader impact.
Top 3 Outcomes
#1
You'll be able to identify the biggest blockers to delivering great work and define and priorities your leadership activities
#2
You'll be able to align your team on a vision for the team
#3
You'll be able to assess your team capabilities to identify skill gaps
Facilitating this session:
Rachel McConnell is a design leader with experience working for BT, Deliveroo, Clearleft, Unilever and Flo Health. She's currently leading content design at Miro. Over her varied career she's had many different roles – from strategy to design and ops – a true T shaped leader who understands how different disciplines operate and what their needs are.
She's the author of Why you need a content team and how to build one and Leading content design, and the founder of Tempo – a community and conference for content design leaders.
