Building a Design Team Culture: from 0 to 1
Introduction
Hey there, my name’s Vish and I’m the design chapter lead here at Zeals.
In fact, just 6 months ago, I was the only designer (and still gratuitously called myself the design lead 🤷‍♂️). But over this second half of 2021, I’ve been joined by a stellar cast of designers: senior designers Junio, Roy, Lu, and intern Uyen.
As this team has grown, we’ve wanted to bring more consistency to all our work and unify our designs given that we’re working in several different product and project-based units.
So how do we do that?
One way is to build a design system — sure enough, this is currently in the works. A design system is all well and good, but really it’s just a tool. What we really want to be building is something more abstract that can help us function as a cohesive team: team culture.
In this article, I’ll be going through the first steps that we’ve taken towards defining our design team culture, taking it from 0 to 1. There’s no solid output yet since it’s an ongoing process, but if you’re working in a growing design team, or if you’re generally interested in exploring ways that you can align your team and build a common culture, I hope you can draw upon something here that might be useful, even if just as a point of reference.
[Team culture is] the shared passion for achieving a fixed outcome and the beliefs and values which develop within a group of individuals who have come together to achieve the fixed outcome.
https://tribe365.co/what-is-team-culture/
The Design Chapter Gasshuku
We decided to hold a gasshuku. Gasshuku is a Japanese word that translates to something along the lines of “training camp”, “retreat” or “workshop”. Zeals has a custom of holding these gasshuku once in a while for various teams to align their visions, roadmaps, organization structures, etc., and since I now had a team with whom I could go deeper on the design side of things, it felt like a good option.
We decided to focus on three topics.
Team Values
- We consider these values as motifs that will help guide us as people within the team, and that will represent the personality of the team. How do we want others to perceive us? How do we want to be perceived? These are just a couple of the questions that we wanted to address with these team values.
Design Principles
- More directly related to our output, we want these principles to act as a guide for us in design, and to define the personality of the product. How should we be approaching designs? What do we need to keep in mind in order to stay on the same page across our different units, without constantly converging to get feedback?
- The most important thing for us with these principles is that we want to empower each other to be creative through a set of agreed-upon guidelines, as opposed to shackling ourselves to a single ideal through a set of rules.
Purpose
- What are we working towards? What’s our mission? Why are we here? What’s the meaning of life (spoiler alert, it’s 42)? Upon deciding on a long-term purpose, it feels important to break down how we can move in the right direction to fulfill it with shorter, more actionable goals.
Similar to what I just said with the design principles, in a larger sense this whole exercise is about providing a space where people can express their creativity in a team environment, rather than being about creating a robotic army of designers who just pass designs down the factory line.
There was a lot to cover, and because we weren’t all in the same place or even timezone, there wouldn’t be enough time to cover everything in one go. So we decided to split it into two parts (eventually three).
- Part 1 — Team values and design principles
- Part 2 — Design principles (cont.) and purpose
- Part 3 — Team bonding exercises and designathon
So far we’ve covered part 1, which is what I’ll be focusing on in this article.
Part 1: Team Values and Design Principles
Team Values
Although the three topics that we need to cover will all contribute towards our team culture, defining a set of team values is arguably the most important, as it also directly affects how you might approach the other two parts.
Our method
We assigned about 10 mins for everyone to first just note down all the different values that they could think of, which they would want to incorporate.
After that, we spent about 30–40 mins going through each person’s notes, where they explained briefly about each note, and then the others would give feedback. This feedback ranged from positive reactions to questions and counterpoints — whatever we could bring up to make sure there was clarity about each person’s opinion.
Once that was done, we collaborated on grouping together similar tropes. Where there were certain tropes that stood out, we dove deeper into understanding them to see if, in fact, they did match up with specific groupings.
In the end, we found that we had 4 categories of notes.
This will be the basis for our final output with the team values, a set of ideas that everyone contributed to and agreed upon.
It’s still a work in progress, but it looks like we’re heading towards a format where we have one overarching value and three sub-values that all function within it.
Next steps?
Consolidate each grouping into writing. Which is actually pretty difficult.Design Principles
As I mentioned earlier, the design principles that we’re working on are to help with defining the personality of the product, and that means that these ideals should be visible in what we create. For example, someone might look at our product and think, “Oh they go for a minimalist approach”, or “That was really easy to use”. We want to make them think that. It needs to be deliberate. That’s where these design principles come in.
Our method
This time, we started by looking for inspiration. We spent about 20 minutes thinking of designs that we consider ideal. It could be anything, apps, websites, electronic devices, movies, furniture, animals — anything. Lu actually even brought up a particular example of a perfect example of a design that she would NOT like to make, which added a nice twist to the exercise (it was the Apple TV controller 👎).
After this, just like in the previous section with the values, we discussed through our collections and identified characteristics of the design that stood out and were common across everyone else’s.
For example:
- Junio proposed the humble restaurant soy sauce bottle. It’s a subtle yet perfect design, which solves a specific problem so well that you don’t even give it a second thought.
- This perfectly connected with an idea that Roy shared, a misremembered quote from someone, that went:
“You don’t really notice good design” or something
- Roy
It’s exactly these shared ideas that we again started grouping together and trying to label, until the point where we had 8 fairly solid design principles to start from.
Unfortunately, we ran out of time at that stage and had to call it a day. The next steps will be to further filter this list down (or up) to a set of principles that we feel comfortable with following as a team.
What did we learn?
Personally, more than learning and expanding my understanding of design, which I did to a large degree thanks to the others, I learned about the team, about Junio, Roy, Lu, and Uyen. I learned about how they think, what they like, what they find fun, impressive, etc. I learned that holding this kind of event in the first place is something that helps build up a pillar of culture within a team. It’s spending time reflecting together and questioning, challenging each other that helps to break down walls that stand in the way of deeper understanding. It’s why I’m even more hopeful of creating a design team culture for and with this team.
It’s time that I really appreciated, and I’m excited to revisit when we move on to parts 2 and 3 of the gasshuku.
To end this article, I want to put a message out to the team:
It’s been a real pleasure working alongside you. Thank you for joining Zeals and helping me build this team. Excited to see what we can do in 2021. Lots of love ❤️
