Design Leadership Handbook

The Design Leadership Handbook is a practical guide for designers stepping into leadership roles, offering a clear roadmap for managing teams, scaling design operations, and shaping product vision. Drawing on real-world insights from design leaders at top companies like Netflix, Airbnb, Slack, Facebook, and Spotify, this book addresses the challenges of transitioning from individual contributor to design leader. Through engaging stories and actionable frameworks, it teaches how to build a high-performing team, manage with empathy, operationalize design processes, and influence across your organization.

Whether you’re leading your first team or scaling design at a growing company, this handbook will help you navigate leadership with confidence. You’ll learn how to hire and coach effectively, give and receive feedback, run design critiques and retrospectives, and partner cross-functionally. With examples from companies like 3M, Twitter, and Mailchimp, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to elevate their impact and build a resilient, visionary design practice.

Designing for Emotion

Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter is a foundational text for anyone seeking to create digital experiences that resonate on a human level. Drawing from psychology, storytelling, and interface design, the book teaches readers how to build trust and delight through emotional design. Walter shows how emotional connection—often overlooked in UX—can be a strategic advantage that drives user engagement and loyalty. You’ll learn practical techniques for using personality, surprise, and visual cues to forge meaningful interactions between users and products, with insights that have been applied at companies like Mailchimp, Zappos, and Apple.

Lauded by design leaders like Jeffrey Zeldman (“This is the book I wish I had written”) and Jason Fried of Basecamp, Designing for Emotion has been called “timeless” and “essential” reading for product teams. In this updated edition, Walter includes fresh examples and expands on how emotional design principles apply across platforms and at scale. Whether you’re designing your first product or evolving a mature system, this book will help you make deeper connections with your users—by making your products feel more human.

Design Systems Handbook

The Design Systems Handbook is a practical guide to building and scaling design systems that improve consistency, speed, and collaboration across teams. Written by leading experts in design and engineering from Etsy, Square, Github, Shopify, and Microsoft, it makes the case for moving beyond bespoke design work toward reusable, component-based systems guided by clear standards. Readers will learn how design systems reduce design debt, improve usability, and allow teams to prototype, iterate, and ship faster.

The book features real-world examples from companies like Google (Material Design), Shopify (Polaris), Salesforce (Lightning Design System), and LinkedIn, highlighting different team models and implementation strategies. It also covers key topics like accessibility, documentation, and testing. Whether you’re just starting out or refining an existing system, this book provides clear, actionable guidance for building systems that scale.

DesignOps Handbook

The DesignOps Handbook is a comprehensive guide to operationalizing design at scale, drawing on the firsthand experiences of industry veterans who have built and evolved DesignOps practices at companies like Pinterest, Facebook, Airbnb, and Atlassian. The book explores how organizations can support growing design teams through strategic planning, improved workflows, and effective tooling. Readers will gain insight into how to manage headcount, develop onboarding practices, support cross-functional collaboration, and cultivate a culture of craft and consistency across product teams.

The authors—Kate Battles, Meredith Black, Dave Malouf, and Collin Whitehead—bring deep expertise from roles leading design operations at major tech companies. Their guidance is backed by real-world examples and interviews with design leaders who have successfully implemented DesignOps frameworks. The DesignOps Handbook is an essential resource for anyone seeking to build better design teams and products in complex, fast-moving environments.

Principles of Product Design

Successful design-driven companies building the best products with the strongest design teams have practices in common. These extensively researched core best practices will help your team design better, faster, and more collaboratively. Combined with the power of design thinking, these product design principles with insights from Netflix, Google, Slack, Airbnb, and more will accelerate your team’s design practice.

Design Thinking Handbook

Few topics are as foundational to the creative process than design thinking. In this book, you’ll learn how to put the thinking-based framework popularized by the Stanford d.school into practice so you can take on challenges in your organization and reach insightful solutions.

Written by Design Better co-host and Stanford product design instructor, Eli Woolery, this book features insights from designers at Google, Uber, Netflix, NASA, Khosla Ventures, and many more.