Pilot: CI/CD Design Reviews
Problem
How might we collaborate more often, earlier, and across groups?
Background
Design Reviews are an important part of a Product Designer's ability to collaborate across teams and counterparts. It helps us align on each other's work, give and receive healthy criticism, raise questions, collect diverse ideas, and raise awareness of what everyone is working on.
Our team does a great job at async design feedback in issues and Slack, but we don't have a structured way to align on cross-stage design problems, share technical knowledge about the product, and become more familiar with the jobs to be done, personas, and insights that influence our design decisions.
Since January 2023, we are dedicating ~15 minutes of synchronous discussion time during our team meeting to design reviews. We meet every two weeks. What we've learned so far:
- The sync discussions have been fruitful and team members expressed they enjoy sync reviews.
- Designers can get immediate feedback on their proposals and be able to collaboratively come up with new ideas on the spot.
- Sync reviews can be recorded and shared with other team members/counterparts, used to inform design decisions and enrich workflow:design discussions.
- ~15 min seems to not be enough for exposing the context of a problem and in depth design critique, and takes time from other topics we'd like to discuss during our team call.
In this issue, I would like to discuss as a team how we can approach sync design reviews in CI/CD.
Proposal
- Make synchronous Design Critique sessions a recurrent team ritual, separate from our team meeting.
- We can try it during FY24Q1 and then we can circle back and discuss our thoughts in a retro.
- Define a format that is inclusive and helps both attendees and host to focus on the problem at hand.
- Decide on meeting cadence and duration.