Ceremonies of a design team
I decided to share the ceremonies/meetings that our design team performs regularly.
Ceremonies sound so exotic, meetings are more ugh. So that is why I went all pretentious about it.
Two years ago, Threefold didn’t have a designer, let alone a design team. Now we’ve got a growing design team that works with clients all over the world in a wide range of industries, so productivity is essential to our success. We do have a set process that we try to follow, but we like to keep it flexible so that they work best for the people in our team.
Here are the regular meetings that keep us informed, connected, and transparent.
Mighty Monday Meeting
Every two weeks on a Monday morning, we get together and go through our team goals so that we can align and grow as a team.
The goals for this meeting…
- To have time to track our team goals and keep everyone aligned with them.
- Identify areas for the team to improve.
- Help us communicate and collaborate as a team.
- Dedicate some time for us to make sense of everything.
How we do it…
During this meeting, we go through the following:
- We review our team OKRs and how we’re progressing with them.
- The majority of time is spent talking about the main theme. This is defined in the previous meeting and is it generally related to improving the team or meeting an OKR — for example, a previous theme was “ideas for contributing to the open-source community”.
- We perform a 15-minute retro on the previous two weeks. This allows us to talk about what worked well and what could be improved. We use the start, stop, and continue format.
- We finish off the meeting by deciding what the theme of the next meeting will be.
Lastly, we take turns on facilitating the meeting as it gives everyone a chance to put their stamp on it and improve their facilitation skills.
Daily Stand Up
Every morning we huddle together to keep the team informed, connected, and calibrated so that we work smartly. Another ceremony is taken from Agile Development, but it works perfectly for us.
The goals for this meeting…
- To be transparent about what we’re doing.
- Help the team flag current or future problems.
- To keep the team organised.
How we do it…
Starting at 09:15, each design member will spend a few minutes to answer these 3 questions:
- What did you work on yesterday?
- What are you working on today?
- What issues are blocking you?
This meeting is super quick and generally is done within 5–10 minutes.
Design Critiques
This is an ad hoc meeting that we perform as needed to collect constructive feedback on our designs. We generally run one or two of these a week.
The goals for this meeting…
- To collect constructive feedback on our designs.
- It will improve the quality of the solution.
- To help team members think critically about their work.
- For members to realise that they are not their work.
How we do it…
The designer who is working on a project calls the meeting where we will do the following:
- The facilitator tells the team the goal of the project and how success will be measured.
- The facilitator shows the designs and gives context about what the team is looking at, and what they should give feedback on.
- The team spends 5 minutes, silently writing down their feedback.
- The team spends the remainder of the meeting discussing the feedback.
- We then create a task list of feedback that we need to address.
The meeting is over once we have the task list, and we can all go back to what we were working on.
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Design Talks
Every month we get together as a team, and one person talks about something new (or old) that is happening in design. This is a trendy meeting and probably the most fun of all our meetings as we get the chance to talk about some really cool things.
The goals for this meeting…
- Help the team learn new things.
- Give team members a chance to work on their presentation skills.
- Kick-off healthy discussions about areas of design.
How we do it…
We take turns presenting each month on a topic of our choice. We allow for a wide range of ideas such as:
- A new tool or technique or trend.
- An area of design that someone is passionate about.
- Some interesting research that they’d like to share with the team.
- An alternative view on product design.
So far, our topics have included information overload, content-first design, empathy, design sprints, responsive vs adaptive design, accessibility, the golden ratio, and keyboard first design.
1:2:1s
Every second week, I spend 30 minutes catching up with each team member to see how they are doing. I much prefer the doing side of being a design lead rather than the “managery” stuff, but this is a must of any team.
The goals for this meeting…
- For team members to have dedicated time with me.
- For them to give me feedback on how I’m performing and for me to do the same.
- To build trust and engagement in the team.
How we do it…
For this, we keep it very loose and the person on the team defines the structure of the meeting, they can talk about whatever they want so I let them lead it. I’m there to answer their questions and give them feedback on how they are performing. This works best for us, and the team are brilliant at leading these. We keep things honest and have fun during them too.
1:2:1s are great at catching things early and spending time to understanding how people are doing. It is easy to forget that people have a finite emotional capacity and that other things might be happening in a persons life that is impacting their work. I want people on my team to enjoy work but live a healthy life outside of it too. Life is for living.
If you're liking my story then you might like monthly design newsletter where I share stories just like this one.Once a month, I send out an ad-free design newsletter where I share the latest articles, videos, resources, and tools that help you stay in the know and grow as a designer or digital creator.Click here to sign up.
Take them or leave them
In a year, we’ll probably be after changing all of our ceremonies so they may not work for your team. But give them a try and see if they do. ✌️
Teams and posts that inspire us
We’ve learned a lot from other teams, and the following articles/content/teams inspire us. So thank you ✌️
Absurd Design for the beautiful illustrations.
Article about Grapefruit’s design team weekly meetings
Designing Team Meetings So They Don’t Suck
