How to Evolve your Growing Design Standup 💻

The design standup: occasional home to colorful Kanban boards and perpetual home to exacting coffee standards. But how, amidst all the designer stereotypes we know and love, do we make it a good meeting? Can it be anything more than a status update?

In my experience, it’s an emphatic yes. And more importantly, with a little bit of TLC, a good design standup can evade the pitfalls of most recurring meetings and provide an environment your team will look forward to returning to every week.*

This one is for the designers out there who have hit a roadblock in their team rituals or are outgrowing what was once a useful routine. It’s also for those first setting up their team looking for inspiration.

During my tenure at Atlassian I saw my design team grow from four to more than twenty. As the owner of our design standup for nearly two years I piloted a number of standup formats before landing on an agenda that kept the team engaged, informed, and having fun in a tight ‘n light thirty minute window each week.

Before I go into what I learned, I want to share the problems these creative congregations are apt to develop as teams grow.

*My teams have typically met weekly, but the principles discussed here can apply for daily use as well

The problem with growth

In my experience, the largest culture shift is when a team grows from a small to medium-sized group (which is a larger jump, in my opinion, than from medium to large.) Members of small teams almost always seem to know what each other are doing without trying.

Small teams tend not only rely on tribal knowledge, but may also fall into the trap of ambiguous meeting goals. There’s time to discuss project updates, team rituals, and even personal lives — so why not do it all?

But as teams grow, the topics that seem less important fall off, leaving the mind-numbingly clerical: progress updates. I’ve heard of design standups devolving into something close to a manager reporting session. The manager may even take control of the team Kanban board themselves, moving each project from “in progress” to “critiquing” and so forth.

This is a problem because it frames the meeting goal as helping one person, and subconsciously tells the attendees they can tune out once they’ve provided their updates. (Ya’ll, we deserve more from our meetings!)

Secondly, prep work. Design standup is a recurring meeting, and like any such meeting runs the very high risk of becoming repetitive and losing steam. From what I’ve seen, the number one way to repel people from a meeting is to make them do unnecessary work for it.

The result is that people find more excuses not to come, or design standup happens less frequently. Everyone loses out on the opportunity to learn from their colleagues and expand their perspective outside their day-to-day project work.

Which leads me to my final point: Designers* are kin! They are tackling similar problems and facing similar challenges. (And more often than not they show a penchant for both hand-pulled espresso and landscape photography. Only half-joking.) Yet designers are constantly obliged to their product teams, often causing alienation from this vital design support system.

If time is not set aside to build this community, it simply won’t happen.

* And design-adjacent folk like researchers and writers

What to do about it

Here are 7 pieces of advice from my experience:

📘 Do your research and state your goals

This one should come as no surprise to any designer who’s been around the block. Design your design rituals! You can’t improve a meeting if you don’t know what’s wrong, how people feel, and what opportunities lie beyond.

Early on, the team discussed briefly on the topic, but I wasn’t satisfied as they typically drove straight to solutions. The problem in my mind was that we were trying to make the meeting everything at once. We were overdue to reevaluate our goals.

To take a step back from solutions, I interviewed my teammates one by one. This allowed me the time to synthesize patterns into insights and come back to the team with a game plan.

For us, we realized standup had become too many things at once. We decided to shift from a project management focus to a community focus. For you, it could be something different.

Getting a temperature reading from teammates, having a group discussion, and coming to a group consensus on our goals not only helped us design our design standup, but also help me gain buy-in from the team.

👋 Involve everyone

So, you want to be the meeting owner? Sounds nice to carry the big stick. But what happens when you’re on vacation or you’re too swamped with work to attend?

An overlooked aspect of any recurring meeting is longevity. A good meeting should live beyond the owner.

Another challenge is team engagement. If one person facilitates the meeting time and time again, it can start to feel like “their” meeting. Subconsciously, the team begins to detach.

Involving the team in the meeting can solve both of these problems, as it not only engages the team, it gets everyone — and I mean everyone — comfortable with leading it.

The way I’ve found most effective to do this is to rotate facilitators every week. My team maintained a page with a simple list: standup date and assigned facilitator (organized alphabetically.) As the ritual owner, all I had to do was ping the facilitator for that week to remind them what to do.

Involving everyone increases the team’s feeling of ownership over the ritual. This not only makes the meeting a communal effort (encouraging ownership mindset), but also safeguards it from a quick death down the line.

⏳ Establish good time-keeping etiquette

I can’t mince words here. If you want to keep your meeting short and you have a group of more than, say, four people, you absolutely need a carefully time-boxed agenda.

As the number of people in a team grows, so does the collective amount of time being used. More voices need to be heard in the same amount of time, and that doesn’t tend to happen naturally.

In my own team, we decided to limit our standup to thirty minutes. Every session started on time, and each agenda item was timed, most crucially the individual one-minute updates. The tight agenda allowed us to focus on the essential and maintain an energetic (but not frantic) momentum.

I would also suggest to model what is expected for facilitators. When the new format first began, I made a point to facilitate. This allowed me to show attendees how the meeting was designed to be run. When I began the facilitator rotation, people already knew what to do.

About time-keeping: Look, nobody is asking for the clock police. However a degree of nudging is really helpful. It’s natural for people to lose track of time. That’s why we have a facilitator — to ensure the goals of the meeting are being met.

In fact, if your experience is anything like mine you’ll find that the team quickly appreciates a well-placed timebox because it makes every minute count. They’ll leave that thirty minutes with a whole lot more value than most one hour meetings provide.

Time allotments can’t be random though. The content they contain needs to fit reasonably in that box. This is where reducing to the essential plays a vital role.

🔴 Share just one thing

One of the tradeoffs we made as our team grew was in the amount of content covered in our self-imposed half hour.

Before, we used to share updates on all or most projects. But that amount of information quickly became overwhelming at scale. While standup was designed in part to draw connections between workstreams, total comprehensiveness was impractical.

Instead, I had each team member share just one thing going on in their world. This way, only the most important information was shared. At the same time, updates could easily fit into a one-minute window.

The 1-minute update format was consistent week-to-week for each person:

• What happened (eg. “We shipped phase two of the dashboard!”)
• A related image (eg. the dashboard design or a zoom screenshot)
• Sentiment in the form of 🌹Rose, 🌵Thorn, or 🌱Bud
• Fun fact

All elements of this format have a purpose. The text and sentiment not only tell the team what happened, but how the person is feeling and if they might need help. The image — which the facilitator pulls up briefly — helps listeners take in what they’re hearing, gives more instant context, and helps with information recall. The fun fact… I’ll get to that in a bit.

Everything in the update was designed to give as much of the right kind of information in as short a time as possible.

⛱️ Reduce prep time

Sharing updates means preparing updates, and that’s something which doesn’t typically cause teams to jump for joy. My personal goal was to make it as easy as possible for the team to contribute.

In other words, in designing a meeting — as when I design a product — I seek to identify and reduce as much friction as possible. (Positive friction is another matter.)

This is doubly important for recurring meetings, where every person is expected to prepare and share something. When effort rubs up against the monotony of repetition, that’s when the friction starts to burn.

Here are ways I reduced prep time for myself and for others:

Prepare a standup page template and automate it as much as possible

Simplify the update format as much as possible

Reduce cognitive load by keeping a consistent routine

💂‍♀️ Minimize changes of the guard

In addition to time efficiency, I also made other small and subtle shifts to keep the meeting running as smoothly and seamlessly as possible.

Early on, I noticed “changes of the guard” were frequent. Someone would be presenting, then would need to stop sharing their screen and allow someone else to share theirs. In a thirty minute meeting, those transitions deducted precious minutes.

Sometimes this would happen if a teammate needed to share their update image. It would also happen when the facilitator was handing off to the show-and-tell presenter of the day. (This was another section in our agenda.)

In response, I made the decision to have just one person share their screen: the facilitator. Naturally, it followed that the facilitator would also take on that week’s show-and-tell. Not only were changes of the guard eliminated, but so was the need to track multiple rotation lists.

😎 Leave space for a laugh

Meetings don’t have to be entirely about efficiency and productivity. As I referred back to the goals for our standup, I believed strongly that getting to know each other as designers, building community, and sharing a laugh had to be included.

It’s all the more true in the context of a remote world and a work life dominated by meetings where colleagues can start to feel more like information transactors than human beings with lives beyond their glowing blue rectangles.

So, to remember our humanity, we introduced a fun fact topic for each week — to be chosen by the facilitator.

At first I was a bit disappointed. Fun facts reek of cringy ice-breakers at corporate conventions. Couldn’t we come up with something more unique?

Apparently I forgot that I was dealing with a bunch of creatives, and I’m happy to report that our fun facts transcended any and all expectations. My teammates would consistently conjure both bizarre and intimate topics which drew out surprising details from the group.

One week we’d have a wholesome chuckle over the classic “What’s your favorite book?” while the next we’d be ROFL reviewing our worst jokes or sharing embarrassing childhood stories.

The format is both simple (needs no explanation) and flexible (can be iterated on infinitely.) And as we discovered, it works just as well for a group that knows each other well as for one that’s just been introduced.

Get to know each other. Let yourself laugh. You can do it with a simple fun fact.

Conclusion

If you keep these suggestions in mind you too can design a kickass design standup. Start by doing your research so you can understand your goals. Then, when designing your standup, ensure it requires as little effort as possible to keep up and running. Designate a facilitator each week to encourage equal effort and shared ownership. Then, at each meeting, have your facilitator keep good time while the team shares updates which are as short as can be. Finally, reduce little frictions like “changes of the guard” and don’t forget to bake in something fun that keeps people connected. Good luck and happy meeting.