2026
/
Masterclass
You cannot lead without tension. The higher you go, the more your work depends on navigating competing priorities, personalities and politics where silence feels safer than honesty. Leaders who avoid conflict create confusion. In this workshop, we will treat difficult conversations as design problems and turn tension into alignment and progress. Drawing from her experience leading design at Spotify and Goodnotes, Yaprak teaches leaders how to read the early signals of conflict, name the real issue and guide teams through disagreement without losing momentum. You walk away with tools you can use the next day. How to surface misalignment early, how to hold firm without drama and how to build rituals where disagreement is productive.
Who is it for?
Leaders, managers, and Super ICs who: Handle high-stakes conversations without fear or avoidance • Create team cultures where disagreement is expected and healthy • Build clarity faster across cross-functional teams • Model calm, clarity, and trust when conversations get uncomfortable
Top 3 Outcomes
#1
Recognize conflict early and treat it as clarity in disguise. Spot misalignment fast and surface it before it escalates.
#2
Use frameworks to handle tough conversations with calm authority and lead groups toward concrete decisions.
#3
Design rituals that make open disagreement productive so trust grows and work moves faster.
Facilitating this session:
Yaprak Gultay Davison is the Head of Design at Goodnotes, an AI note-taking app that helps people write, think, and collaborate more intelligently. She leads a 30-person global team focused on scaling design quality, systems and leadership structures that help great work thrive on its own.
Before Goodnotes, she spent five years at Spotify, where she led the design team that brought podcasts and later audiobooks into Spotify’s core experience and went on to become Director of Product Design for the Personalization team, shaping how millions of users discover and connect with the content they love. Earlier in her career, she held senior design roles at Fjord and Publicis, and founded a creative studio in Istanbul.
Yaprak writes Leadership as Craft, a Substack publication and mentoring program helping design leaders grow through systems, clarity, and candor.
