How to run a successful design team

Design Team Culture and Collaboration at Hinderling Volkart

Milo
Hinderling Volkart
4 min readJun 26, 2018

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Since the beginning of 2010, Hinderling Volkart has run a highly regarded digital product design team. It has always been a passionate team of thinkers and doers.

In this short article, I would like to share some detailed insights into how we run our team, collaborate and exchange knowledge.

Our designers are often fairly busy, which is a good thing, of course. But when deadlines are tight, it is sometimes challenging to keep the team in synch and communicate. We have come up with multiple ways to do so. Whilst exchanging knowledge related to innovation, inspiration, tools and tricks in Slack, we also apply personal exchange formats to talk about what’s going on in and outside our work.

1. Daily Exchange via Slack

Simple but effective: Quick shares related to any sort of inspiration, tools or general advice go into our #creation Slack channel. This is also an ideal place to gather quick and short feedback from anyone in the team or to carry out low-fi internal A/B tests.

Also Fun: The “who is the most active members competition“ in the sidebar, as well as the “10 Highlights” to see the top messages of the month. (If you wonder, the posts in the screenshots are: a newly added design related event in Zurich, https://hadronapp.com/, https://blog.figma.com/figma-styles-beta-a-new-way-to-apply-text-and-layer-attributes-1ecde1b0de74 and https://icons8.com/music/)

2. Weekly Design Exchange

Our weekly Design Exchange is a short show and tell gathering to talk about current projects or challenges one is working on. It lasts for 30 minutes every Wednesday before lunch and we move from workstation to workstation to look at work-in-progress files on the screen. No preparation is required. It’s about providing a short overview of one’s current work. Sometimes the team provides immediate feedback or short discussions come up. Longer discussions continue during lunch.

Weekly Design Exchange at our Office in Zurich

3. Weekly Design Update

At the end of each week, we get reminded to post our latest design outcome into the #design-weekly Slack channel. We simply set up a Slack reminder, and every designer is supposed to submit her or his latest exported, PNGs.

This is an easy way to see everybody’s work in one stream. The channel is also open to all non-designers at the agency.

This is how our slack channel stream in #design-weekly on a Friday around 5pm looks like.

4. Monthly Design Forum

Our Design Forum is held every couple of weeks over an extended lunch. It usually lasts for two to three hours. This is when members of the team present some of their expertise, learnings from projects and general design or team related topics get discussed (check the image below with our short “3D for designers” introduction). This is also when we discuss team activities.

Opening Talk from our 3D Designer http://www.stephanwalter.ch/ at our last Design Forum

5. Yearly Design Trip

Once a year our whole design team goes on a fun and inspirational design trip. These trips are dedicated to have a deeper exchange about experiences and challenges in projects, the sharpening of our vision or simply having a good time together. What we do varies from trip to trip. Sometimes we visit conferences, award shows or we run a “creathon” (kind of a hackathon for designers) to learn something new.

Here are a few impressions from our last design trips all over Europe.

Helsinki 2012, European Design Week and Award Ceremony
Amsterdam 2016, Awwwards Conference and exhibitions
Hamburg 2017, Creathon and sightseeing

6. Frequent Design Team Events

Most recently we started to set up smaller design team events to collectively visit exhibitions, talks or do fun stuff together. We have simply set up a Google Calendar anyone can submit events to. Whoever is interested can subscribe and attend whatever is on.

Simple shared Google Calendar for frequent Design related Events

That’s it. Thanks for reading, or at least scrolling that far. We would like to hear what you think or how you run your team. Leave a comment or just give us some.

If you would like to read more from Hinderling Volkart and our team follow our publication: https://medium.com/hinderlingvolkart

If you are interested to join our team check out www.hinderlingvolkart.com/jobs

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