How to run a regular design team meeting

Holding a weekly team meeting is a common tactic for building a community of practice. Booking a room and picking a time each week to get together for an hour with others working in the same discipline is a pretty low-friction way to get started.

But having attended and run a lot of these meetings, I’ve found there is a big difference in how purposeful and productive they are. A talking shop and forum to air problems is definitely better than nothing. But if you really want to grow and develop as a professional community, you need to introduce aspects of deliberate and reflective practice into your sessions.

I thought I’d share the structure I came up with for the weekly design team meetings when I was interim Head of User-Centred Design at Land Registry, in case it helps other teams get more from their get-togethers. I doubt it’s perfect. But it is simple and easy to remember (and hence to use). And we definitely found our meetings were a lot more productive when we followed the pattern than when we didn’t.

A simple formula for a more productive design team meeting

The meeting splits into 3 parts:

1. Updates

2 mins for each person to share:

• what they did last week
• what they’re doing this week
• have they got any work to share and show

Use a timer — if you don’t you’ll over run.

Capture anything that might need more discussion on a post it and stick it up on the wall (or use a whiteboard, flip charts or virtual equivalent). Just write the topic. Don’t discuss yet. Try to group as you go to save time at step (2).

Review topics

Quickly recap the topics that came up in step 1. Check if there’s anything else anyone wants to throw into the pot. If you have a big team or a lot of topics you could dot vote on what to discuss and what you’ll leave to a later meeting.

But don’t get sucked into discussion now, leave that until after…

2. Show The Thing (critique)

This is a chance for anyone to share what they are working on. To make best use of the time I recommend one person share one thing each week, rather than everyone sharing. But a couple of things can also work.

Sometimes there won’t be anything anyone wants to share and that’s OK. Just try not to go more than 2 weeks without someone sharing something.

Most important though: show work in progress. The real value of sharing work with your peers is to get feedback and support. Encourage people to bring the things they are really stuck on and struggling with, not just the things they’ve finished and are really proud of (though do that too).

This session should be about critique, and learning to give and receive constructive feedback on designs. Keep the meeting a safe environment where people can be open and honest about problems, and get constructive help.

Although I’ve called this “show the thing” don’t just show’n’ tell. Practice presenting the problem you need to solve, and how you are seeking to tackle it. Encourage people to use the session to get help on a design problem or something they are stuck on. You’ll find this is a great way to quietly grow your skills as a team.

This is important for everyone whatever their level. But I’ve found it particularly helpful for making sure juniors are getting the support they need, especially when they are largely working on their own (which they shouldn’t be, but we all know it happens). You’ll spot where perhaps someone needs extra help from someone with more experience to tackle a problem or have a difficult conversation with stakeholders. This can be missed when juniors are embedded on a team on their own.

3. Discuss

Refer back to the list you made in step 1. What issues do people want to discuss? Pick a few to talk about in more detail. This is an opportunity to air problems and discuss as a group how you’re going to respond to situations that affect the whole team.

This is also where you can mention stuff like events coming up, or anything else that needs a bit longer than the 2min initial update.

Leave this until the end, as otherwise it’ll take up the whole meeting — and the critique part is more important…

Tips

1. Stick to the plan

Sometimes I’d relax and not follow the formula so exactly. I’d forget to bring the timer. I wouldn’t capture themes. We’d spend twenty minutes going round and round a problem none of us could actually fix. But I noticed that the meetings weren’t as productive when that happened compared with when we stuck to the formula.

That said…

2. It’s OK to mix it up

I think the initial quick go round is essential so you pick up if someone has a major problem. And encouraging someone to have something to show each week, however small, is important for developed a culture of reflection and critique. But sometimes we’d devote the rest of the meeting to a different activity. For example at Land Registry one week we looked at the GDS skills matrix for designers, and where we each thought we were on it. And another time we reviewed the post-it notes we’d written when I first joined, setting out the team’s hopes, fear and goals for design at Land Registry. It turned out we’d made more progress than we thought.

3. Celebrate wins and successes however small

Encourage applause and cheers. Give out silly badges and awards (one team member used to draw sheriff badges on post-its with whatever ad hoc award they thought someone deserved that week).

4. If it’s turned into a moan-fest…

End with a quick round robin where you ask people to call out something good or positive that’s happened. There’s always something. Even if it’s really trivial it will lift the mood, get everyone pulling together and hopefully send people away in a slightly more positive frame of mind.

Why it works

I did a bit of reflecting on why I think this formula works in writing this post. I think it’s because:

1. It makes sure everyone gets a chance to celebrate successes, air concerns and show a bit of what they were working on.
2. It helps stop meetings either getting dominated by one person or issue, or turning into moan fest.
3. But most importantly: the structure includes time for “reflective practice”.

Jason Bootle introduced me to the concepts of deliberate and reflective practice at UX Cambridge 2016 in his talk Building a Reflective Practice: what we can learn from elite sports. Reflecting on his talk, I realised why this formula works is that it turns the meeting into a forum for the team to reflect on their work and how to improve it, not just a talking shop.

A lot of design team meetings waste this opportunity. They easily become rambling and unfocused. Things descend into a moan-fest about how, yet again, design isn’t being taken seriously. Or one person’s update dominates the whole meeting because they’re tackling a really gnarly problem.

But having a time to get feedback from your peers is really important when designers are spread across multiple teams in an organisation. They spend most of their time getting critique and feedback from non-designers, rather than the informed peers who can really help them grow. Your regular time together is a precious opportunity for you all to develop your design practice. Don’t squander it.

So whatever format you use for your design team meetings, if you do nothing else, make sure you build time for reflective practice into your time together.