Design Team Rituals at Alcumus
I’m a Product Design Manager at Alcumus, where I manage a team of designers based in North America. My team and I are part of a larger, global design team at Alcumus, which is fully remote and distributed across multiple countries. A key theme for us over the last year has been to help team members feel more connected and to improve our overall communication.
I was recently tasked with revising our design team rituals to help address a few key issues:
- Team members were siloed within their time zones.
- Design critiques were not resulting in valuable feedback, and it was often the same person who would volunteer their input.
- There was a lack of communication and collaboration between our marketing and product design teams.
- We were experiencing meeting fatigue.
I started by interviewing the team to gather their feedback on our current rituals and by reading several helpful articles, such as this one by the designers at Figma. I then proposed a new set of rituals, reviewed them with the team, and tested them together.
Before: Our Old Design Rituals
Before diving into our new rituals, here’s a little about the ceremonies we had in place prior to the revamp. I should note that 1:1s are another meeting that we held and still hold to this day; I just haven’t gone into detail about them because they’re unchanged.
Weekly Design Planning: This was very much like a design team standup. I would pull up our team’s Jira board, and each designer would speak about their assigned tickets. Many people felt that this session wasn’t a valuable use of their time, and as the team grew, we struggled to keep it short and sweet.
Office Hours: This was our weekly design critique. We would alternate between weekly morning and afternoon sessions to allow team members in North America and the UK to join. There was no critique format and no time limit for sharing. Most weeks, the same few people would share their work and offer feedback, but many others were quiet. Also, we often went down rabbit holes in our discussions, lost track of time, and not everyone had an equal opportunity to present.
Design Demo: This session was intended to be a fun session to end our week, where everyone would take turns quickly presenting their work. However, these “show and tells” often turned into critiques, and we faced the same issues as in Office Hours. Because we did a poor job of managing our time, not everyone had a chance to share.
Personal Growth Day: The idea of Personal Growth Day was that designers could block off the last Friday of the month to focus on personal growth activities, like reading a book, taking a class, working toward a career goal, etc. Unfortunately, team members rarely used this time as they had meetings booked with other teams on that day or had too much work on their plates and felt guilty utilizing that time for themselves.
Design Retrospective: A monthly meeting where we would reflect on what went well, what could be improved and what we should stop doing. We would each take turns facilitating these sessions. The group felt like these meetings were too frequent. Not enough transpired in a month for us to reflect on. Furthermore, because this session didn’t accommodate all time zones, it wasn’t truly a retrospective for our global design team.
After: Our Revamped, Global Design Team Rituals
One of the most significant issues with our previous ceremonies was that most of them were held in the afternoons (in EST), which made it impossible for our peers in the UK to join. Our new ceremonies are all scheduled before 12 PM EST / 5 PM BST, allowing everyone to participate. An added benefit of this is that our afternoons (at least for those in North America) are a lot more open (more blocks of focus time!). The North American team now makes it a point to reserve our morning hours for meetings with peers in the UK.
Here’s what our new ceremonies look like:
Weekly
Coffee Time
Who: Product designers (optional)
What: Catch up and kick off the week
When: Monday morning (EST)/afternoon BST, 15 mins
Why: Ease into the week, improves connections
This is the equivalent of us catching up in the lunchroom on Mondays and casually chit-chatting about what we did on the weekend. It’s a fun way to kick off the week and have some fun together.
Weekly Updates
Who: Product designers (required)
What: Individual updates on weekly goals and progress posted in a chat
When: Mondays by 12 PM EST/5 PM BST
Why: To keep one another accountable; to have visibility into what everyone is working on
We replaced our Design Planning session with an asynchronous chat. On Mondays, a reminder is sent to all team members to post their weekly updates in the chat. The reminder includes a template, which members can fill in with updates.
This asynchronous format has worked very well for us. Often, conversation threads will spin up under someone’s update, and follow-up meetings can be scheduled if needed. We’ve also been enjoying spreading the love through Kudos. This has helped a lot to increase transparency across our team.
We also did away with our design Jira board as we’ve now started to embed designers within their squads better. Design tasks are being tracked in the squads’ Jira boards. This gives everyone in the squad visibility into all sprint work (regardless if development or design related) and eliminates the need to create duplicate tickets in a design Jira board.
Huddles
Who: Product designers, open to anyone to join (optional but recommended)
What: Design critique
When: Twice a week in the morning (EST)/afternoon (BST), 1 hour
Why: To help team members get unstuck and improve the quality of our work
Huddles are our new name for design critiques (I’ve avoided formally calling them critiques as, for some, this word can have negative associations). Each Huddle includes two 30-minute slots, which designers can sign up for in advance. Imposing a time limit on Huddles ensures that conversations stay focused and gives everyone a fair chance to share their work.
We’ve also introduced a new format for critiques. I created a FigJam template that designers fill out before their slot. The template forces them to provide some context about the problem they’re trying to solve and outline precisely what kind of feedback they’re looking for instead of just jumping into UI. This is a great practice to get into, not just for critiques but for sharing your work in general. I won’t go into detail about the template; I want to save that for another post (stay tuned!).
Another important aspect of our new critique format is that we now have more structure around when and how to give feedback. After a designer presents their work, we set a timer for 5–10 minutes, and we each leave comments in the FigJam file. Our feedback is grouped by “likes”, “challenges”, “questions” and “ideas”. Once everyone has had a chance to leave their comments, we go around the room and review each person’s high-priority feedback. We usually can’t get through everything in 30 minutes, so we take it offline in a chat if needed.
One last thing to note about Huddles is that this ritual is not just for the design team. When designers book a slot, they’re free to invite anyone from within the organization to join and share their feedback.
Virtual Wall
Who: Product designers (optional)
What: A chat channel for asynchronous feedback
When: Anytime
Why: For quick feedback polls and to allow for more detailed feedback outside of Huddles
Some team members prefer to request asynchronous feedback or to ask quick questions. For that reason, we created the Virtual Wall chat. Designers will post recordings of their work (following the same format as the critique template) or post polls. Sometimes there isn’t enough time for us to get through all our feedback in a Huddle slot, or some people would prefer more time to think about their response. An asynchronous format allows us to think more deeply about the feedback we provide. I also set up a weekly automated reminder in this chat asking if anyone would like to sign up for a Huddle slot.
Monthly
Design Jam
Who: Product designers (optional)
What: Team bonding and learning activities
When: Once a month, 30 minutes to an hour
Why: To learn and have some fun together
Design Jam is a fun way to get to know one another and learn together. We take turns hosting an activity of our choosing. If a new team member joined recently, we might play a game. We could invite a guest speaker, share a nifty product we found recently or debate a heated topic. It’s up to the facilitator to decide! You could do this bi-weekly as well, depending on the size of your team.
Design All Hands
Who: Product and marketing designers (required)
What: Sharing highlights from the last month
When: Once a month, 1 hour
Why: To increase transparency and collaboration between our teams
This session has dramatically improved communication and collaboration between the marketing and product design teams. Every month, I send out a FigJam file where everyone fills in a section highlighting their work from the last month. During the session, each person is given 3 minutes to speak about their work, and then we open the floor to questions and feedback. We enjoy seeing what the other team has been up to. Sometimes these sessions help us uncover opportunities to collaborate on projects. It’s also helpful to receive feedback from different types of designers, as we all bring unique perspectives to our work.
Quarterly
Design Retrospective
Who: Product designers (required)
What: Review progress on quarterly goals, retrospective activity
When: Once a quarter, 1 hour
Why: To ensure we’re progressing toward our goals, to foster continuous improvement as a team
We start this ritual by reviewing our progress toward our quarterly team objectives. From there, we take turns hosting a retrospective activity. We consider the outcomes of the retro when planning our team goals for the next quarter.
Not One Size Fits All
Not all rituals make sense for every team. The types of meetings you hold depend entirely on your team's size, design maturity and needs. Talk to your team to understand what makes the most sense for you. Most importantly, iterate on these! Check in with your team members regularly (I send a poll every couple of quarters) to see what improvements can be made, and we adjust as needed.
