Germany

UX Design

UI/ Visual Design

Design Operations

UX Research

Daniel Ley

UX Strategy Manager and Co-Founder of kickstartDS

kickstartDS

Mastodon

Bluesky

Usability Testing

Public Speaking

Product strategy

Communication

Organisation skills

Stakeholder management

Leadership

Design systems

User research

Adobe XD

Airtable

Axure

ChatGPT

Figma

Jira

Miro

Adobe Creative Suite

Sketch

Empathy

Prototyping

Qualitative research

Introduce yourself, define mentoring expectations and goals. Learn and grow together.

General mentorship

Making remote and globally distributed teams work for you and your needs.

Working remotely

Learn essential burnout prevention techniques and replenish physical and emotional energy.

Managing burnout

Talk to people who have learned to manage their imposter syndrome.

Dealing with imposter syndrome

Navigating micro-aggression, getting paid what you are worth and finding a community.

Being a woman in tech

Understanding factors that lead to a motivated team - recognition, communication and more.

Keeping team members motivated

Understand the process of training, motivating and directing your team members.

Managing people

How to create a positive workplace culture that drives collaboration and productivity?

Fostering a good team culture

Steps to building and maintaining a strong, cohesive and effective team.

Building an effective team

Learn the tips to successfully manage a team in a remote environment.

Managing a remote team

How to maintain trust, commitment, accountability deliver results while handling conflict

Avoiding common dysfunctions

How to set up the team for success by defining and measuring team's performance.

Choosing metrics and team goals

Best practices for running productive design critiques.

Running effective design critiques

Methods of prototyping and solution validation. When to use which kind of prototype (eg. Webflow, Notion, etc)

Prototyping methods and tips

Manage team expectations and get the most out of your meetings.

Running effective meetings

Identify and define potential product problems and generating possible solutions.

Identifying problems vs solutions

Learn how to properly present your work and share ideas and opinions.

Presenting your work with impact

Tips on how to work and collaborate with designers.

Working with designers

How to work with team members with different skill sets but towards a common goal?

Working cross-functionally

Methods and models of exploring, deciding and delivering design.

Building a design process

Managing being the only designer at your company and working with non-designers.

Being the only designer

Explore different generative and evaluative research techniques. User research synthesis and presentation.

Conducting good user research

Ways and resources to improve your design skills.

Improving design skills

Navigating the working relationship with PM's and engineers as a designer.

Working with product and engineering

Ways to provide constructive feedback to team members.

Giving effective feedback

Tips on how to work and collaborate with engineers and developers.

Working with engineers

How to conduct interviews, what to ask, and how to analyze your results? (eg. user interview)

Conducting effective customer interviews

How to think about design career paths and what progression looks like for designers?

Design career path

kickstartDS is the framework for digital design systems. We enable web developers to create consistent and brand compliant frontends super efficiently. Our comprehensive component and pattern library ist the starting point to serve all your digital touch points.

With Ruhmesmeile we are developing kickstartDS, the frontend first framework, a comprehensive component library helping frontend development teams create consistent and brand compliant design systems and web frontends super efficiently.

We enable web development teams to create consistent and brand compliant web frontends super efficiently. With a built-in Design System to serve all your digital touch points. 
Easy like squeeeeezing a lemon 🍋

UX coach for intrapreneurs in the global innovation BU. Working fully remote, I help new business ideas come to life, by leading product discoveries for the next big internal ventures. To validate or even invalidate product ideas, I trained POs to conduct hundreds of user interviews, dozens of user tests, surveys, journey mappings etc. or in short: ramping up UX strategies to make the process a collaborative team effort. 

High quality and scaled user research deserves to be sustainably documented while staying
lean. For this purpose, I introduced the principles of Atomic User Research using
Airtable – which several BUs have successfully adopted.

Acting as an internal "champion" for the Amadeus Design Factory - the global design system and style guide for all product interfaces.

Led a department of seven designers across different sites in Germany, and we started Lean UX implementation in the leisure BU of Amadeus. I was coaching product teams into user centered design methodologies, conducting ideation and design thinking workshops. We worked hands-on with agile teams, making them meet real users - often for the first time. I also started an internal program called the ProdUX Café to evangelize the data driven product validation mindset. 

As a side project I was supporting the global UI community of Amadeus to setup a digital design system language.

Led a team of five designers with a mixed UI/UX scope. The team was responsible for every little piece of design and interaction for a wide range of products for tour operators, travel agents and online travel agencies. 

In addition I was acting as Product Manager for „Bistro Portal Live Consultancy“ - which helped travel agents to combine online and offline retail. 

Further the management board assigned me as leader of a steering committee for the organizational development program of Traveltainment. With whom we ran a cultural analysis of the companies who had been acquired and merged resulting in the agile transformation of the Leisure BU.

Developed the design team from a one-man-show to a four-people team. During this period I was a shareholder of pixell GmbH, before we got acquired by Amadeus through Traveltainment in 2010. We were pioneers in designing mobile Apps for TUI, Kuoni, Thomas Cook, Weg.de and many more. The design team specifically helped create award-winning products like Amadeus Dynamic Campaigns and the Expedia Leisure App.

Daniel Ley🇩🇪

About Daniel Ley

Expertise

What mentees say