2016 Product Design Offsite

Management Anchors

Anchor 1

Each designer has unique challenges and goals. As a result, it’s difficult to set a consistent standard and uphold it across the board.

Key Takeaways

• The Leadership Principles have been really helpful, but have also created confusion about the purpose of the Roles document. How can we clearly use and reference both of these when discussing goals, giving critical feedback and generally helping designers advance in their careers at BuzzFeed?
• Our Roles document needs to be revamped to be more specific about expectations and set clear bars that designers and managers can work to achieve.
• Relatedly, our expectations for Sr. Designers in particular should be raised and made clearer.

What We’re Going To Do

• Rewrite our Roles Doc with an eye for clarity around expectations.
• As part of setting consistent expectations, define a consistent, sharable design process.

Anchor 2

To maintain a positive environment, we need to couch critical feedback and avoid being direct.

Key Takeaways

• All of us make the mistake of framing critical feedback in a positive way. We frequently couch important (and sometimes imperative) feedback in “shit sandwiches,” which gives the impression that the feedback is not that important.
• This shows up in Design Crit, 1:1s and Reviews, making all those formats less valuable and impactful than they could otherwise be.

What We’re Going To Do

• Make radical candor a core component of our roles as design managers, and also for each design level. Require our entire group to embrace being openly critical about our work and, in the appropriate channels, each other (in a kind, thoughtful way).
• Communicate the value of constant, honest feedback to the design team (before annual reviews) and then deliver on that.
• Share our written annual reviews amongst the managers (and all reviews going forward) and make time to workshop each of them. Give each other feedback on how to be more straightforward and actionable in our language.
• Have the design team (including managers) share their goals with one another. Managers to share designers’ goals with Group Leads for increased help and support. Cap will share managers’ goals with VPs.

Anchor 3

With exceptions, Design Managers should not be doing hands-on design work because they won’t have the bandwidth to do it well, and so that they have more time to focus on management and supporting their team.

Key Takeaways, 1

• The role definitions for managers could use more clarity. It is currently difficult right now to succinctly describe our roles and contributions to our Product, Engineering and Project Management peers in our Groups.
• Designers come first. It doesn’t seem like we’re currently spending our time as well as we could be. We should be actively engaging the designers in our Groups and offering them assistance and guidance regularly.
• As managers of people, the goal is to help the designers improve their work, there are many tools at our disposal to do that - whether through offering verbal feedback, grabbing a whiteboard, setting up a design sprint, or grabbing a sketch or an html file.

Key Takeaways, 2

• As managers of a Group, the goal is to bring a design perspective to our product roadmaps and team processes in order to influence what and how we build.
• All that said, it’s important for managers to have passion projects like Solid, Design Sprints or new prototyping tools. Dabbling in these areas helps us stay up to date with design topics we each value, as well as provides personal satisfaction.

What We’re Going To Do

• Cap will reevaluate and rewrite the manager roles and responsibilities.
• Message manager’s roles on Groups to our peers in Product, Engineering and Project Management.

Design Anchors

Anchor 4

Sharing work regularly and openly is good for the end result.

Key Takeaways, 1

• There’s no agreed-upon or articulated bar for how much or how often to share work publicly with the design team.
• We all agree that sharing is valuable and positive. It helps us articulate design concepts and increases transparency across our team.
• How can we engage engineers more in the design process? We’ve each heard from different engineers that they’re intimidated to leave feedback on Basecamp. But we want their voices heard and not relegated to side conversations or DMs.

Key Takeaways, 2

• We agree on the goals of Basecamp: transparency & awareness, squad communication (time-shifting) and soliciting design feedback.
• For many designers, writing doesn’t come naturally and it takes time to produce a single post.
• Many times, threads don’t “end” and instead simply die out with no resolution or sense of what’s going into production.

What We’re Going To Do

• Simplify what designers feel required to keep track of: limit expectations to tracking their particular Group’s threads.
• Simplify how we start threads: lead every new thread with the Product kick-off document to set context.
• Set expectations for the minimum number of updates: starting with one per week for active, in-flight projects.
• Set the expectation that threads need to “end.” There should be a sense in each thread of the final result and what shipped.

Anchor 5

Getting the entire team together to look at work regularly is healthy.

Key Takeaways

• If the point of our Design Crit is to get feedback, we aren’t currently getting the most we can out of it. The time between people presenting is too wide and irregular. Basecamp is much more useful at the moment.
• Because it’s a rotation, our current format means we aren’t always looking at the most important work in the moment. There are times that someone is presenting work that’s already well into development (and not as fungible) or too early to get real feedback on.
• In contrast, our Group Crits are highly valuable. We should consider extending the time.

What We’re Going To Do

• Experiment with a sign-up system for the Design-wide Critique.
• Up to Groups if they’d like to extend the critiques for now.

Anchor 6

Having one designer responsible for an entire squad/product is sufficient when augmented with regular critiques and feedback.

Key Takeaways

• Being the only designer on a squad creates a sense of ownership and allows the designer room to tackle new skills.
• That said, ensuring that every designer sits next to another designer would help with getting feedback and facilitating design conversations.
• Senior Designers should take on more responsibility for providing regular feedback to the design team to supplement manager feedback.

What We’re Going To Do

• Rotating, weekly office hours with Senior Designers, who proactively reach out to designers working on projects in their earlier stages to share and collaborate.
• As best we can, make sure designers sit beside or in very close proximity to other designers in their Group.

Anchor 7

Quarterly Reviews are useful because they give people constant feedback from their peers.

Key Takeaways

• We all agree that it feels good to get more focused feedback on a quarterly basis.
• However, peer reviews are too much to be done every three months. Peer reviews for the mid-year and annual reviews feels like a good cadence.
• We should use the in-between quarters to review personal and professional goals and adjust them. Should still be structured, but more lightweight.

What We’re Going To Do

• No changes to annual reviews.
• Mid-years to be written self review. Manager will collect peer reviews verbally and deliver.
• For end of Q1 and end of Q3, an hour-long 1:1. Designers and managers to write quick notes about each of their goals (citing progress, challenges).

Q&A