How to Share Work Across a Large Team
The Experience Design team at Wayfair comprises the disciplines of product design, user research, content strategy, and UX writing. We’re spread across over a dozen distinct product teams, which are further broken down into many scrum teams. Each team optimizes a unique part of our customers’ experiences.
As you can imagine, in an average week, we produce an immense amount of work. As a result, if you tally that production across our entire design organization, our individual output is often invisible outside of our scrum team.
That lack of visibility presents dangers as we grow and contribute to the greater experience:
- Duplication of effort
- Extended project timelines
- Stagnation of skills
- narrow view of the overall experience
- Lack of org-wide transparency
We felt those pain points acutely when we were a team of 25. After growing to be three times that size, we expected to feel more pain in the future.
With our function growing in the company, it became apparent that we needed to find ways for us to come together to share our work, the problem sets that we were solving, and the methods we employed to solve them.
How do we get eyes on all work effectively?
Design critiques/reviews
With 25 people, we could prioritize the work shown, perhaps getting through half the team in a 2-hour session. We could rotate to make sure everyone has the opportunity to share bi-weekly. Is a critique what we would want with this many voices? How would we scale as we grew? Maybe not.
Activity feeds
Providing a news feed of work would be minimally invasive to the team. It would provide the desired transparency. An added bonus being other functional teams having access to view. We experimented with Slack and Wake (RIP) to create an activity feed. While our cross-functional partners appreciated the voyeuristic view, the passive contribution model led to little activity. The feedback loop was also messy and ineffective. Spoiler alert: Fast-forward 18 months and Abstract has successfully supplied us with this method of sharing (thank you, Therese!). Maybe not.
Yeah, a lot of thought had been put into how we could come together as a team. So much so that we overlooked a simple answer: casually getting the team together. We could go back to our school days and revisit an old favorite… “show & tell.”
We quickly came up with a few organizing principles:
Safety’s a must.
This isn’t intended to be a critique. This is one-way communication to the team. Each sharer identifies their content and message. This could be a win they had, something new they learned, or a call for help when starting a new project.
Make it painless.
It should be easy for all to share. No content guidelines. No presentations. Simply dump your content in any format, and at any stage, into a dedicated Slack channel. This created our agenda and set a quick and casual tone that encouraged participation by all. Limit ourselves to 20 total minutes of sharing. Encourage one-on-one feedback and questions to happen post-share.
Consistency is key.
Make it a daily occurrence. Get together every morning at 9:30am. Each day should be “owned” by specific groups. This would ensure show and tell became a morning habit for everyone.
After starting, we soon began realizing the following benefits of our morning get togethers:
- a stronger sense of community
- began connecting dots to similar projects
- our individual presentation skills grew stronger
- a new channel for coaching/mentorship opened
Over the past two years, we’ve: tweaked the morning owners a bit, refined our setup to accommodate remote participants, and recently moved to bi-weekly sessions to accommodate sprint cadences. But the spirit of the morning show and tell is strong as our team continues to grow. It’s a key opportunity we have to come together and be reminded that there are others like us.
It was a simple solution that ended up bringing some unintended but great results. See for yourself in the video below!
