How we redefined rituals to optimize cross-team and cross-location collaboration
Senior Product Designers Fabiana Alegrio and Shubham Shreya share how they brought three teams closer together by establishing shared rituals.
Around the world in a tea break. At Zalando, it is common for teams to span multiple locations — bridging our Berlin headquarters and our tech hubs in Dublin, Dortmund, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Zurich. Cross-location collaboration has long been integral to our company culture. The prevalence of remote work in recent years has only emphasized how fundamental it is for us to forge close connections, no matter the distance.
As Tsedal Neeley, Harvard professor and author of Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere, suggests in her timeless Harvard Business Review article, the success of global teams depends on the degree of emotional connection between team members. She cites team identity, shared purpose, involvement, and empathy as crucial factors in healthy, productive, and fulfilling working relationships across locations.
When three of Zalando’s B2B and B2E product design teams — the Partner Program, Connected Retail, and Wholesale — recently merged into one organization, Partner Tech, establishing shared team rituals was a top priority for Product Designers. Not only was it necessary to optimize efficiency by integrating ways of working, and to bridge the geographical distance between the teams based in Berlin and Helsinki. It was also essential to create an environment supporting all the aforementioned interpersonal factors so that the new team configuration could flourish. Senior Product Designers Fabiana Alegrio (Connected Retail, Helsinki) and Shubham Shreya (Partner Program, Berlin) joined forces for the project, along with a former colleague from Wholesale (Berlin).
“When the three teams came together, we realized we were solving many overlapping problems, despite being focused on slightly different areas,” says Fabiana. “Shared rituals would be a way for us to ensure everyone is up to speed with what’s happening in different parts of Partner Tech.”
The independent teams were already working strongly with certain set rituals that supported their daily flow of designing. “Rather than adding too many extra meetings,” Shubham explains, “we asked, how can we synthesize our efforts? We needed to build on what we had in common without impacting the rituals specific to the domain of each team.” The design critique would be one clear focus, a bar-raiser valued across Zalando’s feedback-driven product design community.
Read on to learn how Shubham and Fabiana navigated the challenge of establishing shared rituals, facilitating successful cross-team and cross-location collaboration at Partner Tech.
Finding common ground
The first step was to compare the existing schedules and team rituals to find commonalities. “We assessed in detail what each team was doing weekly, fortnightly, monthly, and every six weeks,” Fabiana explains. “We saw that bar-raising rituals were a common way to improve the design standards we all practice at Zalando. There were also certain community rituals within each team that we wanted to extend to the entire Partner Tech community.”
“To converge these rituals and optimize alignment, we knew we had to establish a common language.”
The rituals often had similar goals but used different formats. For example, Connected Retail and Wholesale used the design critique to present work and get feedback. Meanwhile, the Partner Program’s version, the Design Club, invited feedback on ongoing work, but also opened the floor to share design inspiration or conference talks, to discuss upcoming trends, or to try new workshop methods.
“To converge these rituals and optimize alignment,” Fabiana continues, “we knew we had to establish a common language. Considering we would have to sync across time zones, we were also mindful of the time dedication we expected from everyone.”
Navigating ambiguity
During the mapping process, the pair realized the project was more ambitious than anticipated. As the Partner Tech team was still forming, unknowns at the organizational level made it difficult to plan with certainty. “When we started this process, we knew our teams would merge, but the new structure was yet to be defined,” Shubham explains. “We spent a lot of time trying to understand how to keep the proposal flexible so that once we had clarity, we could move this project forward.”
Shubham and Fabiana asked themselves what they could do immediately to deliver the most impact to the three teams. With the guidance of Head of Product Design Hertje Brodersen, they narrowed their focus to establishing two shared Partner Tech rituals: a fortnightly design critique and a weekly community get-together. The teams would also continue conducting their individual design critiques every other week. The pair called this their “transitional proposal,” knowing it would likely change over time.
Building connections
The community meetup, named the Coffee Chat, would be key for building connections in the Partner Tech product design community. “The Coffee Chat is an opportunity to come together and relax for half an hour and not discuss anything work related,” says Shubham. Opportunities for informal exchange, as Tsedal Neeley points out in her Harvard Business Review article, are essential for developing empathy with our colleagues, helping us interact productively in more formal contexts.
“The Coffee Chat serves as a place to build psychological safety and trust in our peers, getting to know each other as human beings, not just professionals.”
Indeed, referring to design critiques and community rituals, Fabiana believes we can’t have one without the other. “Design critiques can be tough for designers. Presenting our work to tens of highly skilled design professionals and asking them for critical feedback is difficult. So the Coffee Chat serves as a place to build psychological safety and trust in our peers, getting to know each other as human beings, not just professionals.”
As well as fueling innovation, the design critique would also be a foundational community builder. “The design critique feeds into other proposals we would like to introduce, such as designing in pairs, a common concept in engineering,” Fabiana explains. “For example, if I were to present my work from Wholesale in the shared design critique, my colleague working on the same topics at the Partner Program would gain a better understanding of my work. Having a bigger space for discussion brings us and our work closer together.”
Shaping it together
Whether we are creating design principles or design rituals, the best way to build something for everyone is to involve everyone in the process. “We opened up the first design critique session as a brainstorming session for the entire Partner Tech product design community, including management,” Shubham reflects. “We asked everyone to share their expectations so that we could incorporate more viewpoints. It was an excellent session. People were very open. From the insights we collected, we added a variety of holistic considerations to our proposal, from how we would run the operations to how the presenters should prepare for the sessions.”
Since then, Shubham and Fabiana have continued asking the community for feedback at the end of each design critique session. “We share a facilitation role during the design critiques,” Fabiana explains. “We always take a minute to ask the participants to send us feedback. Since we are in transition, we still do not have the answers to all the questions arising from this process. The only people who have those answers are those participating in these critiques. For example, someone highlighted the structure of our meetings: how can we use the first five minutes while we wait for everyone to jump in, rather than just comparing the weather in Berlin and Helsinki?”
A promising start
Since the Partner Tech rituals were implemented in early March 2023, the design critique has received a lot of positive feedback from the presenting and participating designers. “Wow! The amount and quality of feedback is superb!” said one of the presenters, Onna Degerman. “A nice balance of detailed notes and questions to expand the solution. I have plenty of action points and a nice dose of encouragement on top.” Meanwhile, two participants independently highlighted how motivated they felt by the opportunity to connect the dots between the different business models of the three teams.
“They gave us a lot of trust and freedom to create this proposal and see what would happen.”
“It has been wonderful to see everybody adapting,” says Shubham. “Consistent attendance is one marker that the ritual is working so far. We will continue to evaluate our progress. A major contributor to our success has been the phenomenal support of leadership. Our leads were transparent that they didn’t have all the answers in this transitional period. They gave us a lot of trust and freedom to create this proposal and see what would happen.”
Key takeaways
Are you currently navigating a team reorganization or facing ambiguity in a project? Here are three key learnings from Fabiana that might help you.
Be flexible
“I love order and structure. But I realized that when we are facing so many unknowns, it’s okay not to know everything. It’s also okay to say we don’t know everything and reach out and ask questions. It was amazing that we could learn from the openness of our leads. We have to do our best with the information we have. That’s much better than saying, ‘We don’t have everything, so we can’t do anything.’ Maintaining a healthy level of flexibility was important for us.”
Question everything
“Think before accepting everything. The original brief we received was considerable. It was a lot of work to complete in a limited time. We pushed back a little and asked if it was the right approach. That led us to agree with leadership that we were better off taking a smaller bite and focusing and building on that.”
Trust the process
“It may be a cliche for us designers, but trust the process. I was often frustrated that it felt like we lacked direction, but upon reflection, that frustration led us somewhere. We gained a lot once we decided to narrow in on a couple of rituals. Accepting that we will not know everything makes it easier to get the ball rolling. We achieved what we set out to do. I am proud to say we have truly helped the Partner Tech community.”
Next, more tips to help you navigate ambiguity: read Senior Product Designer Şeyda Ülgen’s guide to finding clarity in a complex environment.
