Leading Design

Leading Design is a community for senior design leaders that regularly hosts community meetups, world-known conferences, and retreats.

The community is for experienced, senior design teams. It has its own private Slack group with over 1,500 members. Inside the group, there are constructive conversations in a supportive, confidential space. It's an excellent resource to further grow in your professional career while networking and connecting with leaders and influencers in the design industry.

To join, you must fill in an application form. The Leading Design team will later review it and accept you. These are the requirements:

• To be a senior leader in an organization's in-house team (not an agency).
• To be the most senior design representative in your company. If your organization is fairly large, you have to be a member of the design leadership team.
• To have moved away from delivery (meaning, you are not a coach or a player in your team, but a leader).

Besides the online group, the community is well-known for its annual conferences. In those conferences, they gather thousands of design leaders from all over the world. The 2020 conference was canceled due to COVID. However, in March 2021 the community organized a virtual, one-month-long festival. 

It was called the Leading Design Festival, and it included a three-day conference, and lots of experts that hosted weekly talks, mentoring sessions, and masterclasses.

The community also organizes coaching programs. They are usually in-person, but this year it was obviously virtual. The program was a group executive coaching that took place from September 15 to November 25, 2021. It was a three-month-long program that included two cohorts due to its high demand, each one ran every two weeks.

Besides learning events, the community takes networking very seriously. They are slowly introducing again in-person events. For example, this November 11 you will be able to attend a community meetup in London. There are few tickets, and you must bring proof of vaccination and a negative lateral flow test taken within 48 hours of the event.

These types of events are excellent places to grab a drink and some food while connecting and networking with other industry leaders. To expand even more your professional network, all while you learn and relax, Leading Design also organizes retreats. The next retreat will be for women only, and it will take place from April 26 to 29, in the Cotswold countryside.