Book excerpt: User Experience Management: Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams deals with specific issues associated with managing diverse user experience (UX) skills, often in corporations with a largely engineering culture. Part memoir and part handbook, it explains what it means to lead a UX team and examines the management issues of hiring, inheriting, terminating, layoffs, interviewing and candidacy, and downsizing. The book offers guidance on building and creating a UX team, as well as equipping and focusing the team. It also considers ways of nurturing the team, from coaching and performance reviews to conflict management and creating work-life balance. Furthermore, it discusses the essential skills needed in leading an effective team and developing a communication plan. This book will be valuable to new managers and leaders, more experienced managers, and anyone who is leading or managing UX groups or who is interested in assuming a leadership role in the future. - Gives a UX leadership boot-camp from putting together a winning team, to giving them a driving focus, to acting as their spokesman, to handling difficult situations - Full of practical advice and experiences for managers and leaders in virtually any area of the user experience field - Contains best practices, real-world stories, and insights from UX leaders at IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and many more!