How we foster team connection on the DoorDash Design team

Co-written by Tae K. Kim

In this article, we share the many ways we endeavor to build team unity on the DoorDash Design team. These efforts were important to us prior to the team going remote due to the pandemic, but they’ve become even more critical while we’re all physically separated. We hope it serves as inspiration for other teams. We’d love to be inspired by your ideas as well, so please share the ways your team has stayed connected in the comments!

Monthly All-Hands

Our monthly team All-Hands is a town hall style meeting that lets the team celebrate and discuss important topics together.

We always start with team celebrations for birthdays, new hires, and “Pear Appreciation” awards (more on that below). We then move onto prepared topics and presentations that run the gamut from team updates to learning to learning and development topics.

Recently, we’ve also focused on personal stories from members of the team as a way to celebrate diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We then end with a group shot that gets shared onto our team Slack. We theme our virtual backgrounds to add another layer of connection to our virtual session.

We end each All-Hands with a group shot and a themed background, like these Design Valentines during our February 2021 All Hands.

PearUps and Pear Appreciation Awards

The PearUp program was created to help teammates get to know each other more directly. Each month, two members of the team get paired up (hence the name) for a 30 minute chat. Prompts are provided as ice breakers, but Pears are free to talk about whatever they want. We then share a short post about what we learned to a Slack channel so the entire team can enjoy it as well.

Continuing the Pear theme, we created the Pear Appreciation Award to give the team a way to recognize each other for their accomplishments. Every month, we send out a nomination form then celebrate everyone who received nominations during our monthly team All-Hands.

When we were all in the office, the person who received the most nominations was given an actual trophy which they could display on their desk. While we’re remote, we’ve switched to sending them a treat using DoorDash’s new gifting feature instead.

Monthly Newsletters

Every month, we send out a Design team newsletter to the entire company to highlight the design process of a specific project. It’s a great way to celebrate the team’s work on a company level, and helps partners better understand our design process.

Our Design Infrastructure team also sends out a team newsletter that focuses on updating our Engineering and Design partners on components in development and recent releases for iOS, Android, Web, and Figma.

Our UX Research team has their own newsletter called ‘Food for Thought’ which shares valuable insights and industry trends with employees at DoorDash. It also offers opportunities to learn about research and how to work with the team.

Published monthly, the Design team newsletters have become a must read for the entire company.

Quarterly Offsites (physical and virtual)

Every quarter, we take time away from the office to engage in a fun group activity together. Past events have included a ceramics course, a virtual reality outing, and an art class of Moroccan geometry!

We take part in fun team offsites every quarter. Pictured here are the dumplings we made — both as a work in progress and the final product!

Most recently we hosted an offsite where we made dumplings together. We paired this with our personal user manual activity, which provided the team an opportunity to document our working preferences so we know how to best approach each other in a virtual environment. In a remote world, we know how important it is to take time to learn about each other and create new memories that we can all share in.

Bi-weekly Design Stand Ups

Our bi-weekly Design Stand Up was created so we could maintain visibility into each other’s work, which becomes especially important as our team grows. (Shameless plug that we’re hiring for multiple roles!)

Every other Friday, we meet for 30 minutes and each teammate shares a project in a lightning round style format. It’s a fun way to celebrate each other’s work, gain inspiration, and connect the dots between projects.

Design Team Birthdays and Dashiversaries

We celebrate two important dates for every member of the team: birthdays and ‘Dashiversaries’ a.k.a. work anniversaries. We create a custom card that the entire team signs for birthdays, and we send out emails filled with congratulatory notes for Dashiversaries.

We also maintain a team Slack channel called #design-celebrations where we can post virtual cheers and unleash a torrent of emojis to celebrate each occasion.

Each member of the Design team gets a custom signed card for birthdays and an email with congratulatory notes for the Dashiversary.

There is no “one size fits all” approach to staying connected as a team, but we believe that maintaining these traditions and introducing new forums as we grow creates a wealth of opportunities for us to keep in touch, appreciate one another, and celebrate our wins together.

We’re actively hiring seasoned talents in all UX functions. Please visit our career page and check out the Product Team!

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