Top 5 Courses for Design Managers
What sets top-performing organizations apart? Well, for one thing, it’s an excellent design culture. Design managers are professionals responsible for cultivating design culture. The courses listed below (both free and paid) will help you master essential tools, become a better leader, and get the very best from the UX professionals you work with.
1. UX Management: Strategy and Tactics
by Interaction Design Foundation (Paid)
This course will appeal to UX leads, UX managers, and UX directors who are looking to refine the way in which they manage UX teams and professionals within their organization.
You’ll learn
- How to hire for, position, and empower a UX team effectively.
- Best practices to manage and support a UX designer and wider UX team.
- How management of UX professionals directly affects ROI—both positively and negatively.
- What your UX team should be doing in order to grow your UX efforts across the organization.
- UX management best practices, from interviews and case studies with experts.
2. Service design
by UXCel (Paid)
This course will help you gain practical skills to create exceptional experiences. You will master user research, journey mapping, business model canvas, and other essential tools for service design.
You’ll:
- Get a comprehensive understanding of service design
- Develop practical skills for your own service design projects
- Gain a creative and strategic approach to problem-solving
- Learn how to encourage collaboration with various stakeholders
3. Leadership Through Design Innovation
by Coursera (Free)
This course offers hands-on experience applying human-centered design process to real-world challenges, and requires you to explore the world around you.
You’ll learn:
- How to engage with end users
- Effectively frame problems and identify potential solutions
- Build prototypes to test assumptions and learn what works (and doesn’t).
4. Data-Driven Design
by Designlab (Paid)
This course will help you gain confidence in your ability to use product data across all facets of your design role — from running experiments, to justifying design decisions with business impact, winning over stakeholders, and more.
You will learn:
- How to use product team tools to learn user behaviors.
- How to use data to strengthen your design recommendations.
- How to create experiments that help improve your products.
- How to show stakeholders the value of your data-backed designs.
- How to break through common data-driven design roadblocks.
5. Design-Led Strategy: Design thinking for business strategy
by Coursera (Free)
This course is for seasoned managers who are looking for tools and techniques to introduce innovative products or services to the market quickly and inform their actions with high-quality customer insights.
You’ll learn:
- How design strategy can be used as a vehicle to communicate corporate strategy
- How to plan and conduct primary market research and how to analyse the results
- How to create usable models and frameworks for gathering user feedback and testing solutions.
