🎨 Figma Design Team Warm Up
Who: Product designers, optionally Cristen (Research), and Tori (Brand)
What: Kick off the week together
When: Every Monday from 9:30 – 10:00am PT
Why: To ease into the work week with something light and fun
Every Monday, we kick off the week together. The 30 minute meeting consists of four parts:
Weekend update
(5-10 minutes)
We each go around the room and share a quick highlight or two of what we did over the weekend (if we’re using Zoom, one person starts then nominates the next person). Even if these days it's some variant of “I stayed home,” “made bread,” “played Animal Crossing,” “entertained my kid”, or “binged Westworld,” it’s still an important tradition. More than anything, it reminds us that we’re all in this together. It also starts the week on a positive note and allows us to ease into the work week.
Highlights
(5 minutes)
We then take a couple minutes heads down to reflect on the week prior, looking back at our calendars to remind us how we spent our time. We compile highlights in a doc to celebrate the little victories. Big projects take time to ship, so it’s helpful to find ways of acknowledging notable progress, whether you made breakthrough in the design, or received some great feedback during user studies. We once toyed with the idea of having a sort of “MVP” of the week for folks who had particularly strong weeks, but that hasn’t stuck and there isn’t always an obvious candidate.
Critique/meeting schedule
(5-10 minutes)
We plan our critiques and team meetings ahead of time so everyone knows what to expect, and so we don’t waste time during those meetings figuring out the agenda. We go around the room again (this time taking the reverse order from who did the weekend updates) and each person decides if they have a topic they’d like critiqued during the week, and on which day. There are typically two critique slots: Wednesday at 9:30am and Friday at 2:00pm (more on that later), but if there’s an overflow of topics, we add a slot on Monday at 4:00pm or suggest they receive the critique asynchronously via Slack. If someone doesn’t have a topic, we still ask that they share their focus for the week so everyone has ambient awareness of what’s going on.
Announcements
(5-10 minutes)
Finally, I share company-wide announcements and updates specific to the design team. This includes topics like information about our user conference, new company policies, hiring plans and candidate progress, or even more tactical things like Rasmus sharing recent changes to our design system. It’s more of an FYI than a discussion, and if there are follow-ups, we add that to the agenda for our Monday 4:00pm team meetings.