The Rise of UX Leadership is a recent post on the Harvard Business Review blog.
Fortunately, there is a great training ground for new UX leadership: the startup market. MBAs and other aspiring professionals are seizing the opportunity to create something new, emulating start-up heroes like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Dennis Crowley. Not all of these startups will succeed, but leaders who join their ranks will learn valuable lessons seeing products and ideas rejected by end-users firsthand. These new UX-minded executives will take top jobs elsewhere, seeding a new UX culture in corporate America. And they’ll certainly be looking to join companies that “get” UX.
Cliff Anderson, who I had the good fortune to work with several years ago, commented that he was disappointed that the article doesn’t mention testing–I think that’s an excellent criticism. While only a few rare geniuses have designs spring from their heads like Athena emerging from Zeus’ skull, the rest of us can make tremendous progress through gathering empirical data and iterating our designs.
I was also just alerted to this article, The Strategic & Tactical Aspects of UX Leadership recently published in UX Magazine.
Which also reminds me–Jared Spool is working on opening a school to effectively teach & train this new wave: The Unicorn Institute. It will be exciting to see how they evolve, particularly since the state of current UX education is primarily catch as catch can.