A thorough and practical career guide for design project and program managers.
Posman and Calhoun offer a clear and comprehensive review of best practices in the design operations profession.
According to the authors, this is the first book specifically focused on design operations, or “DesignOps.” Posman and Calhoun both hold senior DesignOps roles at Salesforce and are experienced leaders in the field. Here, they set out to create “an essential field guide” for project and program managers in design and design-related areas, defining DesignOps as the work of “designing the design team’s experience” in order to “create the conditions that make great design possible.” As the title suggests, the book’s structure is musically themed—clever chapter titles include “Learning the Score,” “Composing Your Career,” and “Maintaining Your Rhythm.” The first three Acts (sections) cover the fundamentals of DesignOps practices, practitioners, and organizations; Act Four covers establishing and growing a practice, and Act Five provides strategies to improve impact. Fittingly for the subject, the text is well thought-out and attractively presented in its breakdowns of methods to combine design thinking with business savvy, building relationships, managing programs, leading change, and communicating effectively. Colored boxes highlight real-world tips and insights from the authors and many senior DesignOps practitioners from well-known companies such as Adobe, IBM, and Google. More than 80 tables, charts, and graphics illustrate key concepts. The book also includes an “Encore” section with 15 adaptable templates, a 10-page index, and a link to a companion website that contains a blog and additional content. It’s clear that Posman and Calhoun are speaking for and to a very specific audience of design-related professionals in web-centric or technology companies. They provide a wealth of useful information, including suggested interview questions and answers and guidance on preparing a portfolio. (Those outside the field will not find this riveting reading material, though they may pick up some good advice on management.) The prose mixes clear definitions and practical recommendations (“don’t start with the solution in mind—start with the customer’s need”), but it’s also filled with specialized terms (affinity-mapping, Scrum) and standard corporate jargon such as ideate, deliverables, onboarding, and “cross-disciplinary synchronicity” that mark this work as a text for specialists.
A thorough and practical career guide for design project and program managers.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781959029236
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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