The UX Leadership Residency

Who this is for

There is a period in most product companies’ growth where UX is clearly the next function to mature, but it is too early to hire a permanent senior leader.

You can tell when the period arrives. Design works as a delivery function rather than a strategic differentiator for your product. Research, where it happens, validates decisions already made instead of uncovering strategic opportunities. Roadmap debates end on instinct and sales pressure. The product works and sells, but has no drastic advantage in your competitive landscape. UX ends up respected in principle and sidelined in practice.

Hiring a full-time leader feels premature for good reasons. A senior UX executive would be the single most expensive design role in the company, hired before the function has proved its strategic value. Nobody inside the company can write the role’s mandate, or tell a strong candidate from an impostor, because that judgement is part of the expertise being hired. And whoever walks into unprepared ground spends their first year on groundwork, at a full senior salary plus equity.

The Residency exists to make that first year someone else’s problem. The benefits of senior UX leadership start now; the full-time hire waits until you know what the role is, what good looks like, and what it is worth.

How it works

• It starts with listening

  The first weeks go to conversations across your leadership team, time with the designers and researchers already in place, and a review of the product, the strategy, and the roadmap. Out of it comes a shared view of where UX is today and what to change first.

• The work follows your situation

  What we work on depends on the team in place, the maturity of the UX function, the existing strategy, and the product itself. The focus may be on strategic direction, on setting the UX vision with the goals and metrics to steer by, on rethinking the design process, on building the research practice, or on coaching the senior people who will carry the function forward. The mix is agreed with your executive sponsor and revisited as the function matures.

• If you plan a permanent hire

  In this case the later months prepare the handover: together we define the profile, the mandate, and the hiring plan for your first UX leader, and everything built during the Residency is documented and ready for them on day one.

• Format

  Part-time, the equivalent of two days per week. Fully remote. Three to twelve months, with a three-month minimum. I report to one executive sponsor, typically the CEO, CPO, or CTO; the sponsorship matters more than the title, because the Residency only works when someone at the top wants it to work.

Who you’d be working with

I’m Kyrylo Slavetski, a UX strategy and design leadership consultant with more than twenty years in product design, design management, and user research. For most of that career I have run UX inside product organisations as a senior leader. In the Residency, I do the same work part-time, for companies that need senior UX leadership before they are ready to hire it permanently.