The Shadowing Practice

A 7-Day Email Course for Design & Product Leaders

Learn how to open your calendar, make your thinking visible, and develop the next generation of leaders.

What You’ll Learn

Over 7 days, you’ll get one short email delivered each morning:

Day 1: Why shadowing is a growth strategy (not just mentorship) Day 2: The exact email template to send before shadowing day Day 3: How to structure the full day with meeting scripts Day 4: Using your whiteboard to think out loud Day 5: The coaching conversation framework (GROW model) Day 6: What blind spots you’ll discover (+ reciprocal learning) Day 7: Your action plan to get started this week

Each email takes 2 minutes to read and includes one actionable exercise.

Who This Is For

Design and product leaders
Managers who want to give back to their community
Anyone evaluating shadowing as a leadership practice
Leaders building organizational capacity through transparency

What You’ll Get

✓ Templates - The exact email I send before every shadowing day ✓ Scripts - What to say when introducing shadows in meetings ✓ Frameworks - The GROW model for coaching conversations ✓ Real examples - Stories from my actual shadowing practice ✓ Exercises - One per day to build your confidence

By Day 7, you’ll have everything you need to host your first shadow.

Join the Free Course

No spam. No upsells. Just practical knowledge from years of hosting shadows.
Unsubscribe anytime.

✓ Free forever ✓ One email per day ✓ Starts tomorrow

How It Works

Enter your email above - The signup form is powered by Buttondown
Get Day 1 tomorrow - Welcome email arrives immediately, Day 1 the next day
One email per day for 7 days - Delivered each morning at 7 AM
Read & practice - Each email includes an exercise to build confidence
Host your first shadow - By the end, you’ll be ready to implement

This Course Is Free

No upsells. No hidden costs. No catch.

I believe in giving back to the community. I’ve learned from others who opened their calendars to me. This is how I pay it forward.

About the Instructor

I’m Esko Lehtme, Design Lead at SEB.

I’ve made myself replaceable in every role—it’s strategy. By sharing my thinking, approaches, and daily work openly, I create space to take on new challenges while ensuring the organization doesn’t become dependent on me as a bottleneck.

Thanks to this approach, other teams have taken over many tasks that only the UX team was doing. These used to be major parts of my daily work; now they’re winding down.

This keeps me growing while the organization scales.

I’ve hosted dozens of shadows — colleagues evaluating career moves, students exploring design leadership, managers from other departments trying to understand how UX works. Every single session has taught me something I didn’t know about my own work.

Read more about my shadowing practice →