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Design Leadership

My experience spans brand design, creative direction, experience strategy. human-centered design and innovation, platform and design systems, data & artificial intelligence, and design leadership.
 

I'm passionate about empowering diversity, unleashing creativity, and improving ecology. And I use design as an infinitely scalable framework, applied to individual careers, a team's current dilemma, or a business's biggest challenges.
 

I’m available as a 1:1 coach and mentor to help design leaders who are ready to level up, or move on. 

I'm available as an advisor to help a team clarify customer problems and project goals, improve collaborative relationships, and codify design and product delivery processes that include customers and drive business outcomes.

I'm available in a fractional capacity to help organizations be more human centered, to help set expectations for the function of design, to coach other functions on how to work best with designers, and to create cultures that value curiosity, velocity of learning and speed to action.
 

I am inspired by humility, curiosity and bravery. I believe human-centered design, combined with critical/systems thinking, is the path to valuable products and services that resonate emotionally with customers, change lives and communities, and deliver massive business advantage.

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Leadership Experiences

Building a killer design team. Building a prototyping culture. Building awareness and appreciation for design. Connecting with and learning from our customers to solve their wickedest problems. Delivering design at scale for a multi-sided platform. And all the lessons I learned about leading design, and designers, at scale.

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Designing the Team to Design the Product & Marketing

I've spent 10+ years recruiting, hiring, managing and retaining top talent. I did so by building a diverse pipeline, adopting a killer recruiting process and sweating the details to create a space and a culture where creativity thrives.

Prototyping

Making prototypes is good for designers and non-designers. Making engages more of your brain - and lends tangibility to ideas we agree on in principle, but question in practice. Prototypes drive behavior - and what people do is far more important than what they promise.

Immersing to Learn and Transform

Immersive experiences are tremendously valuable tools of transformation. Stepping away from your office provides the opportunity to engage your whole self in experiences designed to change your mindset and fuel your spirit. I've been designing transformative immersions for years to inspire employees.

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Case Study: Design Capabilities for reuse across a Platform

Designing for re-use. Considering the Customer-facing experiences, the data we'll use to tailor them to our customers and the under-the-hood developer experience that makes them adoption-ready, off the shelf.

Case Study: Design System 2.0

The Intuit Design System's mission is to deliver data-guided Design & Code to accelerate and unify our AI-Driven expert platform.

Free Resources

These are some of the reusable frameworks

I leverage to coach individuals, teams and organizations. The resources are free. Teaching you to use them is not.

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A Talent Strategy Designed to
Deliver Resilience.

Three dynamics I lean into: Creating a magnetic and inclusive culture, changing the trajectory of every designer's career, and planning for succession, promotion, mobility and attrition.

Case Study: Showtime Sync

This Emmy-nominated app paired Showtime's live and streaming content with second-screen polls, teasers and other interactive moments designed to heighten and extend the experience.

Helping Early Career designers find their calling, their voice and their feet.

If you would like to spend 30 min discussing your portfolio, your ambitions and your options, you can find me and schedule an appointment on https://www.adplist.org/ 

What I'm writing about

I use Medium to write periodic observations on what I'm thinking about and what I'm doing about what I'm thinking about. Generally I focus on information I hope will be helpful to designers and aspiring designers. I've included links to some of my most read and shared articles here.

Listen

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Jered O Show: Episode #007 with James Helms

Jered and I discuss design leadership, emotional design and making accounting interesting.

LIFTOFF: UX Outside the Box (w/ VP of Design at Intuit, James Helms)

Tony and I cover my role at SMU, Cafe Momentum as a case study for design thinking, how human centered design has lead to some of Intuit's biggest innovations, and more.

The Way of Product Design: 32 - James Helms, VP of Design @ Intuit - "Your co-workers are your portfolio"

Caden and I discuss my role at Intuit and lessons learned as I made the transition from individual contributor in agencies/consultancies to leadership for Intuit.

Service Design Show: 190 - How to get Design out of the box it's been put in... with James Helms

Marc Fonteijn and I discuss how Design has been hamstrung by agile, rendered ineffective by corporate planning, and has undermined its own impact by spending too much time, energy and effort explaining why it matters.

  • LinkedIn

©2023 by James Helms

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