From practitioner to manager: finding the balance in a time of transition

Nobody gets into design to approve timesheets or fight for budgets. But at a certain point, you’ll have to ask yourself: how much of my time is on the practice and how much is on management? Do I have to become a manager to be promoted? Am I ok with it? I ask myself these questions quite a lot… and it happened that I just made the biggest leap towards management in my career a few months ago. It’s been an interesting journey, an uncertain time of transition and constant learning. I hope that by sharing my story  you might find some inspiration on how to find the right balance between hands-on and hands-off time.

Valeria is a service designer. In her work, she helps her clients design and deliver human-centered services. Valeria always worked in consultancy: she started her career in a strategic design firm in Shanghai, and then set up the design team of one of the few independent Italian design agencies. Tired of great food and sun, she decided to join the founding fathers of service design at Livework in London. She then joined Idean, where she now works as Service Design Director.

Growing leadership through mentorship

Giles Colborne from cxpartners and Rachel Liu from Pearson will give a joint talk giving an an insider perspective from the mentor and mentee of what makes a great mentorship and how it helps us to lead and grow. Did you know that UXPA UK have a mentoring scheme for members and that Giles is one of our mentors? You can find out more on the mentoring scheme on our website.

Giles co-founded cxpartners in 2004, working on next generation experience design and generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue for companies such as Marriott, eBay, and AXA. His book, ‘Simple and Usable’, has sold tens of thousands of copies worldwide and is now in its second edition. He speaks on the topics of simplicity, delight, and product management at conferences around the world.

Rachel has over ten years of experience in design-thinking, strategy and international research. In the last five years, she focused on shaping the future of education with service design thinking. She’s been building the first service design practice at Pearson Education and helps teams, schools and organisations to adopt design-thinking to solve complex problems and shift cultural change. She has also coached many professionals in making their career transition to UX.