Design Rituals

Designing meetings for designers

Maker time versus Meeting time. If you ask designers which they prefer, my guess is that 90%+ will choose Maker time. 

To a designer, maker time is often likened to a magical, euphoria-inducing trip, where the ultimate high is to feel “plugged in”, to get “in the zone”, or to reach “flow state”. Your creative juices flow freely as you find yourself hours deep into that Figma file, watching user sessions, or coding an animation. For more on this feeling, make sure you pick up “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”, two of my personal favourites. 

But unless you’re a lone wolf freelancer, the reality is that your weekly schedule is a mix of maker time and meeting time. As a product designer in an agile environment, you find yourself in meetings with your immediate product team (e.g stand-ups, sprint planning, retros, workshops), meetings with engineers, meetings with marketing, meetings with sales, meetings with customers, and so on.

There are meetings everywhere!

I deeply care about protecting maker time for my team, but given that meetings are a fact of life and they naturally creep in, my goal is to be mindful and deliberate when taking designers away from their precious flow time. One way to appreciate the value of meetings is to understand and agree that design is a team sport. By working together, we can build better connections with each other, we can uphold and raise the bar of design quality, and we can shape our own design culture!

Here I’ll focus on the rituals I’ve used with my design teams in the past, most recently during my time at Properly.

Weekly

Product & Design Stand-Up

Who: Designers and product managers

What: Individual updates on weekly goals and blockers

When: Tuesdays at 2PM, 30 mins

Why: Keep each other accountable, have visibility into what everyone is working on

The nature of working in a product company is that product managers and product designers are closely entwined in the shaping and building of the product roadmap. At any given time, a project that one team is working on can impact all the other teams! For example, working on site-wide navigation or onboarding will affect all teams. In my experience, silos and communication gaps can sprout when designers and product managers are not in the same room to talk about their work and highlight blockers, accountabilities, or dependencies. 

I’ve found that a quick 30-min stand-up once a week with designers and product managers can prevent silos and create opportunities for better collaboration. 

 

Design Reviews

Who: Product designers (and their PM), and other guests the presenter chooses to invite

What: Review in-progress work

When: Three times a week, 30-min slots

Why: Help designers get unstuck and improve the quality of our work

Design reviews are easily my favourite meeting of the week. As a design team, we evaluate work-in-progress and give feedback to the designer presenting. Although we mostly gravitate towards reviewing visual artifacts like wireframes or high-fidelity mocks, I encourage designers to bring to review things like journey maps, interview scripts, card-sorting tests, research insights, customer stories, motion experiments, illustration ideas, or other artifacts that designers spend time “making”. 

When it comes to raising the quality bar of design, I fundamentally believe that “more is more”. The more designers get together and review each other’s work, the more opportunity for creativity, consistency, delight, team-bonding, collaboration, and learning. At Properly, I instituted review slots every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 4pm. 

 

Design Team Meeting

Who: Product designers

What: Discuss team-wide projects, company announcements, how to uphold design quality

When: Fridays at 11AM, 1 hour

Why: Create a safe and regular space for team discussion

As your design team grows, typically beyond 3-4 designers, the number of projects, challenges, opportunities, blockers, and ideas multiply. You need to carve out space and time to discuss plans that will impact your team and take a more more long-term view at your team’s culture. 

I like to categorize this meeting’s agenda into three buckets:

  1. People - How are people generally feeling? Is work motivating or de-motivating? What company-wide people issues may be affecting our team (e.g. team changes, new hires, HR policies)? When’s the next team social?

  2. Process - Process is not one person’s responsibility, so here we discuss and revisit our team rituals (the ones on this page!), present new design tools and techniques (e.g. How to use the KANO model, unlocking Figma superpowers), or how to work better with our product and engineering counterparts (e.g. roadmap planning, developer hand-off, understanding metrics).

  3. Projects - The focus here is on projects that the design team owns, not regular product team projects. Some examples include evolving our design system, tackling design debt, reviewing or updating our design principles, or bringing more moments of delight to our users.

Monthly

Design All-Hands

Who: Product and marketing designers

What: Share highlights and ships from the last month

When: Once a month, 1-hour

Why: Increase transparency and collaboration between our teams

In a typical small-to-mid size technology company, Design will often split into two camps: product design and marketing design. In the simplest example, product owns the application and marketing owns the public website. Although design skills can be transferrable between the two, the focus and output of the two camps varies quite significantly (e.g. an in-app feature to add favourites to your cart vs. a testimonial section on the homepage).

Both camps are made up of designers. And both camps speak the same language. 

Bringing the two together to share work-in-progress and celebrate wins helps to hone the design language and culture of your company as a whole. So once a month, a design all-hands can be a super lightweight, fun, and social way to talk design shop. Every designer takes 5 minutes to share a work-in-progress mock or something they’ve shipped. If there’s time left in the meeting, the team can pick a particular project and dig deeper into a critique. 

 

Design Coffee / Social

Who: Product and Marketing designers

What: Catch up and talk about non-work topics

When: Every month, 1 hour

Why: Improve social connection, de-stress

It’s important to slow down, put the mouse away, and spend time together as a design team to form social connection in an unstructured way. There’s much more to work than just the work. It’s about living through a shared experience, building relationships that can last a lifetime, and staying empathetic to each other.

In a remote world, I’ve been a fan of Zoom socials with my team, from online games (Jackbox, escape rooms), to virtual paint night, to simply grabbing a favourite drink and showing up on Zoom to catch up. Naturally the conversation steers into latest Netflix show, hot new design trends, people’s side projects, upcoming travels, and more.

Although these are fun, nothing beats real-world get-togethers. Bowling, paint ball, restaurant/pub, axe throwing, weekend camping, scavenger hunt, going for a hike etc. The options are endless!

Quarterly

Design team retro

Who: Product designers

What: Review progress on people, process, and projects

When: Every three-months, 1 hour

Why: Reflect on what’s working and what’s not

Who doesn’t love a retro? It’s one of my favourite tools to step back and reflect on “how we work” together as a design team. Every quarter we meet to share feedback on what things are going well and what things can be improved. 

Originally retros lived in a Google sheet, but it’s just way more fun to use stickers and high-five each other in a FigJam! Some topics that have come up in retros are things like:

  • Working with developers

  • Tackling design debt

  • Organizing our Figma files

  • Documenting research playbooks

  • Reviewing design team rituals and cadence

I also take inspiration from RetroMat for activities to facilitate the retro.

 

Wrap up

I believe a high-performing design team understands and is mindful of both maker time and meeting time. One of my main responsibilities as a design manager is to solicit feedback and iterate on what rituals drive the highest impact and help us work smoothly. 

The rituals will vary by team size and company size, and there’s no one recipe that fits every scenario. The rituals can always and should be tweaked, replaced, or re-invented, which I think is part of the fun of “designing” the way your design team works.

Thanks for reading!