Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Announcing our new conference, Design Leaders

If you are a senior designer, leading and managing design in your organisation, or looking to move into these roles, you’ll know that they involve a range of capabilities you may not have necessarily honed as you developed your skills as a designer.

Recognising this, we’ve created a brand new event, Design Leaders, modelled on our really successful Code Leaders event. It takes place in Melbourne on April 11.

If you think this might be of value to you, we’d love to have you there, so read on for more about the day, who’s speaking, and what you’ll get from attending.

What Happens on the Day?

Design leaders comprises four 90 minute sessions, each facilitated by a deeply experienced practitioner in their area. It’s not a day of lectures and presentations, but a mixture of presentations, conversations, activities and question and answer sessions, all fully catered, and with great coffee (and tea) to top it all off.

  • In an era of fake news on Facebook to Nazis on Twitter to creepy kids’ content on YouTube Sara Wachter Boettcher author of the recent best seller “Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech” will focus on Ethical Design Leadership: Examining our impact, articulating our principles
  • As diversity and inclusion move toward centre stage, Emma Jones will consider how we can unravel the unconscious bias that all of us have and create better teams and team cultures (and products as well)
  • Mags Hanley has lead design teams around the world, and coached and mentored design leaders for years. She’ll provide insights into better design leadership, with plenty of activities to hone these capabilities
  • Stephanie Troeth, who has lead design research at places like the UK’s Telegraph Media Group will explore how design, and designers can help drive business and organisational strategy.

There’s much more than this across two big days, so why not take a look at the complete schedule?

Intimate audiences

We keep the audience limited in size to ensure the best possible engagement, and places are well on the way to being sold, so don’t miss out!

Alongside our Design conference

Design takes place in conjunction with our Design conference, which focusses on the leading edge of digital product and service design, from UX to interaction, design research to strategy and more. Attend both for 3 full days of design leadership and practice.

Early bird pricing ends March 16th!

delivering year round learning for front end and full stack professionals

Learn more about us

Out of any conference, Web Directions is far and away our favourite

Dave Greiner Founder, Campaign Monitor