Josh Brewer @ Design Leadership Summit 2018
summary
Design work moves from scattered Dropbox folders to a committed versioned workflow: Photoshop as the canonical format, Subversion for sharing (git proves impractical), and a hacked WordPress intranet that surfaces daily commits — an experience later baked into Abstract. A design group that starts as 5 designers scales through 12–14 during a 200→2,000‑person company growth, ships a major redesign six weeks into a two‑month exploration, and gains our files ownership and transparency, accountability, consensus across orgs. Commits become signals; early public drafts catch problems and invite useful cross‑company feedback.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction and welcome
- 3:04From designer to CEO
- 6:43Early collaboration struggles at Twitter
- 10:40Tooling and version control challenges
- 15:40New Twitter redesign and team alignment
- 20:39Opening design to the whole company
- 24:14Transparency accountability and consensus
- 27:03Breaking design stereotypes
- 29:36Fear of sharing work early
- 32:06Design leadership and advocacy
- 33:29Embracing failure in design
- 35:39Q&A session
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