Staging environment
Workshop

Player-Coach: The Workshop for Hybrid Design Leaders

Yuan Wang

Head of Design, Maven. Ex-Airbnb/Twitter

Thrive as a player-coach design leader without burning out.

The design leader's role has changed. Flat orgs. Reduced middle management. Companies are now hiring for player-coach roles everywhere.

More design leaders are being asked to ship and manage at the same time — often as one headcount doing two jobs. The result: burnout, misalignment, and talented leaders quietly stepping back to IC work.

I've been a hybrid design leader at Airbnb. For the past 4 years, I've been a player-coach leader as the Head of Design at Maven.

This workshop teaches the mindset and skillset that I've learned the hard way: when to play, when to coach, and how to do both without burning out.

What you’ll learn

    Workshop agenda

    • How to Play: Craft and Communication

      What changes when you're still shipping but also responsible for a team's output. Distinguishing the work only you can do from the work you do by habit.

    • How to Play: Strategy and Calibration

      Being the connective tissue between design and business without becoming the bottleneck. Hands-on exercise to build a personalized calibration framework for when to jump in and when to step back.

    • Break: 15 mins

      Short Break

    • How to Coach for Growth

      Coach and critique that builds taste and autonomy. Learn the coaching skills and mindset to scale yourself and empower others to step into their own wisdom. Yuan will do live demo and practice.

    • Develop Your Player-Coach Action Plan

      Let's turn the learnings into actions. You'll map where you are now, identify your default mode (over-playing or over-coaching), and build a concrete weekly action plan for the shift you want to make.

    Learn directly from Yuan

    Yuan Wang

    Yuan Wang

    Contact

    Head of Design at Maven. Certified Coach. Ex: Airbnb/Twitter/Mozilla

    Coached design leaders from
    Pinterest
    Airbnb
    Salesforce
    Mercury Bank
    Microsoft
    See all products from Yuan

    Who this workshop is for

    • Senior, Staff, or Principal designers interested in stepping into Head of Design or newly in the role.

    • Design managers who still ship and want frameworks for balancing playing and coaching without burnout.

    • Founding designers at early-stage startups scaling from being the solo designer to hiring and growing a design team.

    What's included

    Yuan Wang

    Live sessions

    Learn directly from Yuan Wang in a real-time, interactive format.

    Lifetime access

    Go back to course content and recordings whenever you need to.

    Certificate of completion

    Share your new skills with your employer or on LinkedIn.

    Community of peers

    Stay accountable and share insights with like-minded professionals.

    Access to ongoing 1:1 support

    Opportunity to get 1:1 coaching from Yuan to thrive as a design leader (separate offering. limited spots)

    Maven Guarantee

    Your purchase is backed by the Maven Guarantee.

    Frequently asked questions

    Maven for Teams

    Reimbursement

    Get your company to pay

    Everything L&D needs: email template, receipts, and certificate of completion.

    Get reimbursed

    Private cohort

    Run a cohort for your org

    A dedicated cohort with a custom schedule and curriculum, tailored to your team.

    Book a private cohort