Revision Rounds are Where Good Ideas Go to Die

Consider this familiar scenario: Your client or boss wants a new design for something, so you create it. Then, they asks for changes, so you make them. They and other team members look at it again, and each of them likes what you’ve done, but need you to make some additions or revisions to really make it perfect.

They cycle repeats. And (spoiler alert), it repeats, and repeats, and repeats until the deadline arrives and nobody feels that much better about the project than they did during the first or second time you touched it.

The original spark has gone out of the work before it’s had a chance to see the light of day. In organizational terms, you might call this a waterfall rather than an iterative process, since so much company effort is being expended up front, without releasing a design concept into the wild, to test it against reality. Not only that, this waterfall can dilute whatever the original concept was, making it even harder to test out, while at the same time reducing everybody’s confidence, morale, and joy in their work.

The pitfalls of group decision making processes like this one have come to the forefront in the last few years, with more and more teams going permanently hybrid or fully distributed and remote. As it turns out, when too many cooks are in the kitchen, the loudest, most stubborn, most intimidating, or simply the person with the most authority is who prevails.

At Groove, we’re a fully distributed team across 4 (sometimes 5) time zones, constantly refining our design process to remove rumination, and work iteratively to get the best and fastest outcome possible from any proposed design concept. We’re still learning a lot and are not perfect, but we have come a long way.

We want all voices on the team to be heard when we make a decision, but not to let one drown out the other. That’s incredibly hard! So:

• We give feedback individually and asynchronously on designs, ideas, and written documents
• Feedback rounds are minimal in number and have time restrictions
• We keep face to face video meetings to a minimum for decision making (chit-chatting and brainstorming are another story!)
• We try to give each person their own sphere of influence in which they are the decision-maker, so that they can create an aggregate of the team’s feedback given, and use that to inform the final call that they make themselves.
• We try to discuss sensitive issues in the right communication tools. ie: Slack rather than email (which can be static and confrontational), or WhatsApp (which can be chaotic).
• We recognize that sensitive, thoughtful communication takes a big chunk out of time out of your day if you’re doing it well!

My favorite tip: Recently, thanks to Brandy on the Groove team, we have been saving some time by creating a #review channel in Slack, where anyone can ask for team feedback on something they’ve worked on, and each request follows a standard format.

1. Name of the Project
2. Who needs to review it (and they get tagged)
3. Which part of the project needs review or feedback
4. The date you need the feedback by

You can react with emojis or comments once you’ve reviewed the item and then it’s on its way to being off everybody’s plate. Happy dance!

If you liked this article, check these out:

1. How do you want to spend your time?
2. I’m re-routing.
3. Start getting sh*t done the fun way at ➡️ Groove.ooo