Weekly Roundup - Issue #12
A week ago, I hosted a quiz prepared (ripped off?) last minute for our design all hands. Preparing and hosting such events isn’t a new thing for me since it’s something I’ve been doing since my undergrad. With remote teams, events have become an important part of keeping your team engaged. Though there’s more that you can do.
So in this issue, I will talk about the team rituals that we’ve setup in my team.
Critiques
Design Critique was the first one that we instituted. This was a design and research only session where designers could present their work to other designers. These would be weekly and designers were encouraged to show work in progress. To setup this session as a safe space, team leads needed to be vulnerable and lead by showing their own work in progress.
Reviews
With a need to showcasing our work and drive alignment with non-design stakeholders, we setup a Design Review. The format of the design review was formal compared to our informal design critique. The role of a design leader is to support their team during this session and try to push design team’s agenda.
Daily Catchups
Since 2018, I used to be the only designer on my team based in India, but until the lockdown I did not think about instituting any daily standups(meetings); partly because I felt they were micro managerial and partly because designers already attended their teams daily standups.
However when the pandemic hit and the designers started being isolated in their houses, Maji and I decided to setup a daily cooler talk. We called it Design Standup but we didn’t want it to be a ‘standup’. We encouraged folks to talk about their personal life, what they were going through and what they were doing. We played games, drew murals together on digital whiteboards and went down internet rabbit holes. Attendance was never compulsory, you could join in if you felt like it. We always posted the link and created a thread of what we discussed on our channel so that if you missed out, you could still follow what was discussed. We are still going strong. This ritual couldn’t have be achieved without the team members especially Maji, Lauditta and Aryo driving the conversations.
aside: I really love the async standup format Gojek’s UX writers use which is partnered with a new prompt every day.
Retros
I was lucky to join a product-dev team which did retros every sprint. It helped celebrate team wins, discuss red flags and improve the culture bit-by-bit. While every product-dev pod needs this, there’s also a need for larger retros aka Health monitor for the functions. Maji came up with the format my team uses which was largely inspired from the Atlassian playbook. Wish we did these more regularly.
Conclusion
There is honestly a lot you can do if you set your mind or a budget for it. (Shopify literally built a game) What we’ve setup caters to our needs and rose out as a need to address issues we faced as a team. Therefore my advice to you is to take the time to understand your team’s needs, figure out where you want the team to be and explore solutions that help you achieve that. Rituals define the team culture, so don’t blindly go in for glitzy solutions, but think long term.