JS
AboutNow
Josh Silverman

Photo by Nick Bruno

Design leadership with heart, mind, and optimism

For 30 years, I have created successful relationships by connecting entrepreneurship, design education, and designers. My purpose is to help others discover their purpose, and to connect people with opportunity.

How I work

I work across three related practices — coaching, recruiting, and design leadership — because in my experience, they’re really a set of values applied at pivotal moments in someone’s career, learning, and collaborative ability.

As a career coach, I help people get clear on what they actually want (and don’t want), and equip them with the language, poise, and confidence to go after it. Karen and Kyle’s stories are what that looks like in practice. It’s also true of Neil, Russ, and dozens of other fully supported coaching clients. As a co-coach with Kat Koh and with Billie Mandel of Mandel Creative — two badass women I’m honored to partner with — one of the clients Billie and I supported in her negotiation received a 230% salary increase.

As a recruiter, I place people — not sets of skills auto-matched by resume. You want the whole person, and you want to support them in their role. For three decades, I’ve built relationships across design, product, and engineering worlds, and I use that network to match candidates with roles where they’ll genuinely thrive. Since launching PeopleWork in January 2024, I’ve placed founding designers and UX leaders, CTOs and staff engineer ICs, content and comms strategists, product managers and ops folks and many more, at companies including Target, Cisco, Netflix, OpenAI, Articulate, and other places you might not have heard of. Yet.

As a fractional design leader, I immerse myself in teams who benefit from experienced design leadership — without a full-time commitment. At MeetingPulse as Fractional Head of Design, not only did I place their founding designer, I led an integrated and globally distributed design team, building the critique culture, hiring roadmap, and operational rigor that outlasted my time there.

Whether you’re a founder looking for fractional leadership and/or an external recruiting & teambuilding partner, or an individual navigating your own career questions and crossroads, I’m here to help you.

Let’s work together

Bio

As Founder & CEO of PeopleWork Partners, I’m bringing a humane design lens to recruiting and leadership coaching — helping people and teams find the right fit for now, next quarter, and next year.

I consult with design teams on critique, culture, collaboration and ops practices — including early teams inside Sequoia Design Lab and Sutter Hill Ventures. I’ve also held fractional leadership and recruiting roles with growth-stage teams like Bunsen Studio, and Series A/B startups like MeetingPulse.

Previously, I was Chair of the Master of Interaction Design (MDes) program at California College of the Arts, where I led the program through a pandemic and into its 2.0 by diversifying faculty perspectives, introducing new curriculum, and securing ongoing partnerships with Google, CNN, and UNICEF. I’ve taught, held workshops, given talks, and guest critiqued around the globe for nearly 30 years. I’ve also led multiple chapters of AIGA, one of the oldest and largest networks in design.

Well before all of that, in 1997, I founded Schwadesign, a lean, holacratic design business, where I curated and led diverse teams for nearly 20 years. Together, our work was recognized by The Wall Street Journal, Rebrand.com, The Boston Globe, and other respected institutions.

My clients have included startups (iRobot, Regrello, Blend, Trinity Pharma), educational institutions (NYU, MIT, Harvard Medical School, Brown University), global enterprise (IBM, Salesforce, UBS, Wells Fargo, Accenture), cities (Providence, RI, and Bethesda, MD), non-profits (American Heart Association, Friends of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute), and many more.

Every day I am driven by great pairings, trusting relationships, harmonious intersectionality, and very long bike rides.

Let’s work together

View CV →

Press and Awards