Gousto Product Design Away Day
As is customary in Gousto Product Design (PD) team tradition, we held our annual away day at the start of August. This time, we were graciously hosted by our manager Stratis, whose lovely garden was the scene of much brainstorming and jamming over the next couple of hours. Despite the erratic weather (classic England ⛈️), we managed to get a few hours of sun and replenish our Vitamin D levels, all while reconnecting as a team and coming up with some great ideas.
Why did we run this?
Teams at Gousto have regular offsites — they’re a great way to connect in person and make sure the whole team is working towards the same goals. The last Product Design offsite took place in June 2022, over a year ago (bonus: read Kelly’s fantastic write-up here!)
In that time, we’ve experienced significant changes but hadn’t had the chance to think about what this means for our team. The away day created a good opportunity for us to bond further as a team and reflect on our future plans in a fun, low-pressure environment.
Stratis and I planned the agenda with these goals in mind, dividing the day into 2 main parts:
- Part I: A team activity to map out our individual and collective strengths by using a radar chart
- Part II: A mini design hackathon (or as we like to call it, a design jam). We’re helping the Propositions team bring strategic ideas for Gousto to life, and wanted to flex our creative muscles by redesigning parts of the Gousto app without too many constraints
10:00am — Icebreaker & Team Update
Rocking up at Stratis’ doorstep at 10am, we were promptly ushered in. Special shout-out to Stratis’ welcoming neighbours who baked cookies for us!
Although we’re a close-knit team and already know each other fairly well, it’s always nice to have a warm-up activity to start the day — this makes everyone feel more relaxed and at ease to speak up and also gets our creative juices flowing. Dima (Lead Product Designer) had brought along a handy deck of Six-Second Scribbles cards, which truly put our quick drawing skills to the test. This is similar to Pictionary and we had a lot of fun trying to guess each other’s drawings — I’m glad to say we all did well!
As anyone who’s facilitated a design workshop will know, sometimes you just need music to fill those awkward silences or keep ideas flowing. For this reason, we created a collective playlist in Spotify filled with summer tunes, which really kept us going throughout the day.
Stratis had put together a diagram illustrating our strategy on a page and team structure for the next couple of months. We spent some time looking through this and jotted down our hopes, fears and opportunities — which helped to spark a productive discussion. There might be a few team changes to come, but we’re looking forward to taking on new responsibilities and learning about other domains.
11:00am — Team skills & strengths
In this first of two main parts for the day, we wanted to spend time thinking about our strengths and areas of improvement, both individually and as a team. We decided a skill mapping exercise would be helpful for this, and prepared some spider diagrams in advance with our Product Design Careers Framework as a guide.
There are 10 pillars in our careers framework, split across two main categories: Product Thinking and Craft. Each person had to rate how confident they were with each of the 10 pillars, and mark with a dot where they landed from Levels 1–5.
When designing the session, Stratis and I agreed that it was important to create a safe environment where everyone felt comfortable being honest and open. We made sure to emphasise on the skill mapping board that this self-assessment on each of the pillars was in no way tied to work performance, and provided an indication of what each level meant:
Sophie (Product Designer) had a great idea for us to think not only about where we are now, but also where we’d like to be in a year’s time. We then put the timer on for 10 minutes while we did this exercise individually, and then spent 15 minutes playing back to the rest of the team.
Through this activity, we realised that:
- Radical focus — the idea of taking on just enough — is important. This is a principle we try to live by at Gousto. Dima made a great point about not picking too many areas on our spider graph to improve in by next year, or it could get overwhelming very quickly
- We should give ourselves more credit for the things we’re good at!
After running through our individual skills maps, we collapsed all of them onto one board, which helped us clearly see which areas to work on as a team.
We spent the rest of the session coming up with ideas for how to keep each other accountable in our skill development journey:
1:00pm — Lunch
Just before heading off to lunch, we took a bunch of pictures with our whiteboard — because what’s an in-person design day without a physical whiteboard and a bunch of post-its and illustrations? The design challenge in question: would you rather fight one horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses?
Suitably pleased with our photo-taking attempts, we then took a sunny walk to Little House Balham, where we had a delicious sit-down lunch to fuel up.
Tip 👍: Taking a break between activities is highly encouraged in the Gousto PD team, as it helps us get into a creative mood
2:30 to 6pm — Design hack
For the rest of the afternoon, we did a design hackathon. After chatting to our Propositions team (affectionately known as ‘Props’), we had the idea to spend some time thinking about strategic ideas for evolving Gousto as a product, based on trends we’re seeing in customer feedback. We’re still adding the finishing sprinkles to these ideas, so stay tuned for when they’re fully cooked and ready to share publicly!
We had a ton of fun brainstorming in person, so I’ll run through the activities we did to spark creative ideas:
Understanding the context
As a team, we first reviewed the problem statement that Props had put together. Whenever we start a new design project, we often take time to do this to make sure we’re really clear about what problem we’re trying to solve and why.
Refining problem statements
We then collectively came up with 2 problem statements, phrasing these as How Might We questions.
Ideation (Crazy 8s)
We spent 8 minutes coming up with 8 different ideas for each problem statement (1 minute per idea). It was refreshing to have the chance to draw on nice large pieces of A2 paper, and the time pressure pushed us to come up with novel and unexpected ideas.
We then took turns running through our ideas, which allowed us to give feedback in the moment and also build on each other’s ideas. We took pictures of our ideas and in truly robust fashion, uploaded them all to our Miro board where we could cluster similar ideas and easily pick out patterns in the ideas.
Prototyping & Playback
Individually, we picked 2 or 3 ideas that we thought had potential, and spent the next hour mocking up what this might look like. We’re lucky to have a robust component library which means it’s quick for us to pull together high-fidelity designs. In addition, this was great practice for us to visualise how the idea worked — if there’s one thing I’ve learnt since joining Gousto, it’s that mapping out and prototyping the whole journey of how an idea works is incredibly useful for thinking through interactions and also helping other people understand the idea better.
Once time was up, we took turns running through our prototypes. This was a useful exercise that helped us to articulate our ideas. Shout-out to Kelly who stitched together a really impressive flow — we were all starstruck!
After the away day
We haven’t just stopped there — in the week after our team day, we’ve spent some time refining our prototypes and writing out the hypotheses underpinning our ideas. We’ve also recorded videos of how each idea works and shared this in Slack, to make it easy for colleagues from other teams to see our work, as opposed to jumping into the infinite canvas of a Figma file (thanks to Kelly for the great suggestion).
Our key takeaways
Throughout the day, we managed to cover a lot of activities, with tangible skills maps and ideas to take away! The whole team felt energised from working together in person, and left with a clearer vision of our goals going into Q4 and beyond. Stay tuned for our next away day instalment!
