What’s in the book
Raising Your Collaborative Intelligence
This book will help you raise the collaborative intelligence of your teams, drawing from interviews with some of the most creative, prolific, and multidisciplinary leaders, authors, and makers in the world.
Collaborative Leadership
Leadership is earned, and the high-performing leaders that we’ve spoken to see leadership as an opportunity to tell stories that inspire others to join the mission, create environments where relationships are built on trust, and operate with a service mindset, leading from the back.
Understanding Your Colleagues
In this chapter, we’ll take a look at how Design Better Podcast guests have honed their skills at reading people and the specific techniques they’ve developed that unlocked their collaborative potential.
Understanding Your Customers
As we learn about customers and their behaviors, we can better understand and potentially anticipate their needs. This information helps de-risk investments of time and money into a new product as it increases the likelihood that the product you’re bringing to market will attract customers.
Mission, Vision, and Purpose
Often, the biggest company an organization faces as it scales is making sure that all of its employees are working towards a common goal. By setting a mission and vision, and adhering to principles, leaders can align teams to overcome massive challenges.
Creativity, Innovation, and Divergent Thinking
Creativity and innovation aren’t solo acts. They rely on deep collaboration to get results, and for teams to be creative collaboratively they need to be in the right mindset, and have access to the proper tools.
Building Together
The act of building a product or service together, from low-fidelity prototypes to high-fidelity user tests, helps the whole team learn what matters most to users and customers, and ship the right experience to them with less time and wasted effort.
Plus—interview excerpts from creative thinkers like Seth Godin, Eileen Fisher, John Cleese, Dan Pink, and Jason Mayden.
About the authors
Eli Woolery
Senior Director of Design Education / InVision
Eli Woolery is the Senior Director of Design Education at InVision, and co-host of the Design Better Podcast. His design career spans both physical and digital products, and he has worked with companies ranging from startups (his own and others) to Fortune 500 companies.
In addition to his background in product and industrial design, he has been a professional photographer and filmmaker. He teaches the senior capstone class Implementation to undergraduate Product Designers at Stanford University. You can find Eli on Twitter and Medium.
Aarron Walter
Author and co-host of the Design Better Podcast
Aarron Walter is the co-host of the Design Better Podcast, and author of Designing for Emotion. He was the Director of Product on the COVID Response team at Resolve to Save Lives, and prior to that, the VP of Design Education at InVision. He founded the UX practice at Mailchimp where he helped grow the product from a few thousand users to more than 10 million. He’s the author of a number of books, the latest of which is a second edition of Designing for Emotion. Aarron’s design guidance has helped the White House, the US Department of State, and dozens of major corporations, startups, and venture capital firms.