You are three weeks into a new lead design role and you are already behind the curve. Not because you have done anything wrong — because the behaviours that made you good at the work are exactly the ones that will undermine you as a leader, and nobody warns you about that in advance.
This playbook gives you a week-by-week execution guide for your first ninety days. Three structured phases, a signature diagnostic framework, and six tools ready to use from Day One — built specifically for design leaders entering corporate and enterprise organisations where the politics are real and the room to fail publicly is small.
What's inside:
The Four Failure Modes — the patterns that end new design leadership roles early, and the timing decisions that prevent them
The Entry Signal Matrix — five organisational signals that tell you how design is positioned, scored weekly from Week Seven with recommended responses and timing
The Week-by-Week Execution Plan — Phase One (Listen and Map), Phase Two (Diagnose and Frame), Phase Three (Move and Prove), with outputs and risk ratings per week
The Design Health Assessment — score your organisation across five dimensions to calibrate your 90-day approach
The Vision One-Pager Template — a three-section, three-sentence-per-section format for your first leadership conversation with your sponsor
The 90-Day Retrospective — a structured review format for Week Thirteen that builds more trust than any amount of early success
The difference between a first 90 days that builds a platform and one that has to recover ground is almost always timing, not intention.
Format: Digital download, A4, 35 pages
You are three weeks into a new lead design role and you are already behind the curve. Not because you have done anything wrong — because the behaviours that made you good at the work are exactly the ones that will undermine you as a leader, and nobody warns you about that in advance.
This playbook gives you a week-by-week execution guide for your first ninety days. Three structured phases, a signature diagnostic framework, and six tools ready to use from Day One — built specifically for design leaders entering corporate and enterprise organisations where the politics are real and the room to fail publicly is small.
What's inside:
The Four Failure Modes — the patterns that end new design leadership roles early, and the timing decisions that prevent them
The Entry Signal Matrix — five organisational signals that tell you how design is positioned, scored weekly from Week Seven with recommended responses and timing
The Week-by-Week Execution Plan — Phase One (Listen and Map), Phase Two (Diagnose and Frame), Phase Three (Move and Prove), with outputs and risk ratings per week
The Design Health Assessment — score your organisation across five dimensions to calibrate your 90-day approach
The Vision One-Pager Template — a three-section, three-sentence-per-section format for your first leadership conversation with your sponsor
The 90-Day Retrospective — a structured review format for Week Thirteen that builds more trust than any amount of early success
The difference between a first 90 days that builds a platform and one that has to recover ground is almost always timing, not intention.
Format: Digital download, A4, 35 pages