A Shared Mission: Uniting Our Teams in a Design Offsite

A year ago, our design team had a one-day design offsite at the beautiful island of Waiheke.

We were a team of 6 designers split across 2 departments: Product Design, and Marketing Design. We were a slow-forming team in a fast-paced, engineering-led company, where Design was just starting to find its place. We were multi-talented as individual designers, but truth be told, pretty terrible as a design organisation. Here are a couple of observations:

1. With all of us distributed across different projects, each designer identified more closely with their project teams than each other as a Design unit.
2. Critical strategic and execution design decisions were being made by other roles or business units, leaving designers to be more of a service provider than a partner.
3. Each designer brought great enthusiasm and passion to their jobs, but all of us lacked alignment, and were thus producing work that had no unified direction and little consistency.

To elevate the level of design leadership in your company, you need to first recognise and cultivate leadership within your team.

We needed change. What better way to break away from the conformity of our everyday norm, than an island getaway just an hour’s ferry ride away? The goals of our offsite were to:

1. Check-out from the daily grind, and check-in on each other’s wellbeing.
2. Do a close, critical examination of our processes and beliefs as a team.
3. Re-evaluate our past and present states, and re-anchor ourselves for the future.

Absolute must-have’s if you’re organising an offsite: Have a crystal clear goal that everyone can express. Then develop an agenda, and share it.

Here’s our game plan designed to help us achieve those goals, and read on to find out how we ran each session:

Part 1: Who are we as a team?
How well do we know each other? — Understanding & recognising our strengths.
How do we work? — Mapping out our current processes.

Part 2: What do we believe in?
Why are we here? — Gaining unity with a team mission.
Our Design Principles — Uniting on a set of design ethics and beliefs.
Our Design Values —Distilling our design practices and etiquette.

The idea is to spend the first half of our day reflecting on who we are as a team, then in the second half, use that to establish our shared ideologies, values, and principles.

Part 1: Who are we as a team?

We each started off in the company with a repertoire that suited the needs and demands of that time, but with tenure and the exponential growth of the organisation, each of us had since advanced deeper into a specialty, or developed new expertise to fill gaps.

How well do we know each other?

Goal: To map the shape of our team, by identifying our strengths firstly as individuals, then collectively as a team.
Tools: Simple pens and post-its

In every designer’s technical growth and development, there’s firstly their professional capabilities shown in the work they’re accountable for (their competency). Then, there’re areas of passion that don’t always get a chance to shine (their interests).

The Task:
1. List down 3 strengths (aka competencies) you see in yourself, and 3 you see in the person to your right. It’s a question commonly asked in interviews, but not one that a working team usually reflect on.

2. Each person talks about what they wrote for the other person, and why.

3. Then, gather all post-its and cluster them thematically around areas of focus: Visual Design, Prototyping, UX Research, Animations, Process & Tools, Writing, Mentorship etc.

4. Get each designer to claim the areas that they are best at (their competency), and ones they’re most passionate to advance in (their interest). Notice I said claim, not get assigned — the sense of ownership here is key.

5. Record each designer’s selection, and get creative with how you might like to visualise it into a team profile. More than a team building exercise, this helped the team recognise who had the most expertise in their chosen fields, know who to turn to quickly when in need of help in a particular field, and find ways to actively support others in a domain.

Every single designer is responsible for a part of the team’s success.

Ludwig — Team Efficiency, Design Advocate
Jade — Art Direction (Product), Mentorship & Culture, Illustration
Mikey — Art Direction (Marketing), Photography, Animation
Yuan — UX research, Prototyping, Accessibility
Scott — Advertising, UX Insights
Nicola — Patterns, Toolkits
Simon — Brand, Tone of Voice

This is a fantastic way to build collective recognition and appreciation. The words of admiration passed around injected a strong sense of unity and positivity in the circle. It was a little ceremony of celebration for our talents, diversity, and love for design!

How do we work?

Goal: To clarify our process, and identify paths of collaboration and areas for optimisation.
Tools: A large canvas, more post-its and pens.

The Task:
1. Build a journey map for your design process. What does a typical workflow look like? Where is the start and end point for every project? How do ideas get developed? At what points do critiques happen?

2. At each touchpoint, further map out what the needs, pain points, and concerns are of each designer with post-its.

3. Share and discuss. If your Design team is set up the way we are (Product Design v Marketing Design), highlight where our processes diverge and converge.

The idea here isn’t necessarily to change the way we work, but to compare our different journey maps, highlight where it’s different, and streamline where it’s the same. Understanding that is central to collaboration, especially at review stages where getting cross-departmental feedback on our work hugely adds perspective, challenges assumptions, and widens our frame of reference.

The two sessions above were easy to participate in. When answering “What are your strengths?”, we either had certain capabilities in us, or didn’t; when answering “How do we work?”, we either followed certain processes, or didn’t.

But the bigger and harder question is: What makes a successful design team?

Part 2: What do we believe in?

Why are we here?

Goal: Create a shared mission that can inspire us to greater heights, and unite us in times of differences.
Tools: Drinks, snacks, anything that can help the team relax and feel comfortable sharing. Post-its, the best tool to make sure everyone has a voice.

The Task:
1. Start with two big questions: (a) Why did you choose design as a career? (b) Why did you choose to work at Vend? What makes working as a designer at Vend different from any other company?

2. Share and discuss over pillows and popcorn.

The key here is to acknowledge our deep-rooted inclinations and desires as designers (these are what made us who we are after all), and align them to the company’s mission or brand promise. Having these anchors are important because as we take on new challenges and face conflict, we are reminded of what’s important, and remain true to each other.

For Vend, our company mission was to help retailers build remarkable retail life — for businesses to thrive in a successful retail environment, and for business owners to find fulfilment in that, instead of getting burnt out by bad suboptimal tools and processes.

For each designer, solving retail problems in the most elegant ways, and optimising for the best user experiences in the software we build, is in essence what helps retailers run their business well and grow.

This was an existential moment as we reflected deeply and shared about what made us be designers, what gives us meaning in our work, and what drives us to success.

Ultimately, we realised a simple fact: we’re all here to make what’s great, not to make just what’s possible.

We’re here make things we’re proud of.

That one line became our mission statement.

Our Design Principles and Values

Up to this point, in our design-thinking and review process, we’ve simply defaulted to universal principles of design. But, when compromises have to be made, as they frequently do, those principles either become too broad, or we have too little mutual understanding of what we value, to help us make those tough decisions.

Goal: To establish a set of principles and values that can form a clear, definitive framework on how we measure good design.
Tools: More Post-its and popcorn. Stickers for voting.

Some of the best advice I’ve received on how to make our principles work:

• Tailoring them to our domain (for Vend, it’s retail). What is important to our industry and our customers?
• Aligning them to our business goals, in terms that would resonate with non-designers. This helps us create allies with other functions of the wider team that need to be part of the design process.
• Making them sticky and punchy.

The Task:
Pre-offsite:
1. Ask all designers to think about:
• What do you value in the way we work?
• What has works well in our process so far?
• What is it about other similar design organisations that they like?

During the session:
2. Collect all thoughts on Post-its on a whiteboard or canvas.

3. Group them into beliefs and behaviours. Each designer gets to argue for ones they found most applicable.

4. Everyone gets 5 stickers to vote for which beliefs or behaviours do they most resonate with. The most votes rise to the top, followed by others in diminishing order. Open up this process with discussions as you go, and curate the list with a bit of wordsmithing.

The chosen beliefs will go on to form your Principles — yardsticks that will guide your design decisions, and evaluate at difficult crossroads which is the best path forward. The behaviours will go on to form your Values, embodying the ways your team choose to move and communicate together.

Through this process, we established 4 principles for good design in Vend, and 4 values for ways we shall work. Read all about Vend’s Design Values and Principles.

For the first time, we’ve got a common vision to unify different designers under one roof, a set of principles and values to help us make better decisions faster, and standards that others can hold us and our work accountable to.

This common language can be shared with the rest of the company, to educate non-designers and invite them into our design process, and raise the level of design literacy in Vend.

One Year Later

Walk around the Vend office and you’ll step into deja-vu moments. You’ll hear Product Managers saying “Yes, but don’t forget we‘re designing for the next 100,000” (principle #4: Be Bold). Or an Engineer saying “I don’t know about this message here, it’s still not clear enough” (principle #1: Be Clear). Or a Designer challenging a variation of a style guide component saying “Why does it have to be different from this? Be consistent until it no longer makes sense to” (principle #2 Be True).

It’s great to see these values and principles stand the test of time and application. They’ve become pivotal in shaping our design approach and identity. By building a shared mission, a shared point of view, we have formed an unanimous voice for design across the company.

If you’re interested to run this with your team, you’re welcome to use the format above as reference for planning your offsite.

Design leaders of the world, I’d love to hear how you build and unite your team!

The Design team at Vend enjoying the sun, sand and sea at Waiheke Island ♡