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Leadership & Diversity—A Fireside Chat with Dantley Davis
Summary
Key Insights
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Military training cultivated Dan Lee's ability to manage both tactical and macro-level challenges, which he applies to design and leadership.
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An MBA provided Dan Lee with strategic frameworks and a shared vocabulary to better integrate business goals with design decisions.
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Design leadership often evolves organically from consistently delivering quality work and influence, rather than intentional career planning.
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Dan Lee views shared ownership and influence in product development as more effective than rigid role ownership between designers and PMs.
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The ‘tax’ of being a person of color or woman in tech includes balancing job responsibilities with advocating for community equity.
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Intentional diversity hiring requires proactive outreach, relationship-building, and compensation incentives for leadership.
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Authentic, vulnerable conversations about race and inclusion can foster understanding and material change in organizations.
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Designers must expand empathy beyond similar peers to include underrepresented and diverse user groups to avoid narrow product focus.
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Recruitment of diverse talent is not passive; it requires strategic relationship-building with communities and organizations.
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Having leadership compensation tied to diversity outcomes, as at Twitter, helps embed accountability for inclusive hiring.
Notable Quotes
"My dad told me very early on in my career that I had to work two times harder than anyone else to get the same things."
"Ownership needs to be shared. The craft of making is similar to raising a child — it takes a village."
"I approached design not from the context of user experience first, but from what job we’re trying to satisfy for our customers."
"There were things I controlled and things I didn’t, and I needed to plan for both."
"It was a tax I had to pay my entire career — balancing the work and trying to lift my community."
"Every manager who works with me knows their responsibility includes sourcing candidates for diverse backgrounds."
"If you don’t have those challenges, it’s a lot easier to make it in the corporate world."
"You need to ask, who are you excluding in the conversation? That’s the disservice to empathy."
"I made an explicit choice: we’re not making any offers until we’re interviewing women."
"Designers who come out of US tech need to pivot quickly toward broader inclusion or risk being outpaced by other markets."
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