Running a Design Critique at Reforge
Working towards a feedback-driven design culture
Published April 2023
Summary
Update August 2023: I’ve also published a work artifact at Reforge on operating this meeting.
I founded and facilitated a bi-weekly “Creative Critique Meeting” in the Fall of 2021 for the Visual Design team at Reforge in an effort to create a stronger feedback-driven design culture. The meeting evolved over time to meet our growing team’s needs, and eventually began additionally hosting critiques for the work our colleagues on the video production team at Reforge were doing. In 2023, this meeting evolved the “Creative Critique Meeting” and not only served as a feedback ritual for our two teams, but a sandbox of cross-functional collaboration and innovation.
My Role
Founder and Critique Facilitator
Teams Involved
Visual Design team and Video Production team (collectively the Insights Experience team)
Cadence
Bi-weekly on Thursdays
Length
45 minutes
Tools
Figma/FigJam, Zoom, DropBox Replay, Loom
Size
3 Designer showcases per meeting
Format
Pre-scheduled agenda where 3 colleagues ask for and receive targeted feedback on specific pieces of work. Work can either be submitted in advance of meetings for the team to think though (via Loom) or presented live to the group and then discussed. Each person has 15 minutes for the team to focus on their work. Meetings are recorded and additional async feedback encouraged via Notion.
Background and Problem
As a remote company, our design team at Reforge lacked many of the collaborative luxuries that being in-person affords. While scheduling formal design reviews and 1:1 jam sessions were part of our design process, team feedback and brainstorming sessions were harder to organize.
I hypothesized that in order for a formalized design critique meeting to serve real purpose, team buy-in would be crucial; and therefore, this became a task of not just setting up a standing team meeting, but building a feedback-first culture, one in which the design team operates around an axis of giving and receiving feedback at all stages of their work.
I needed to take the team along for this ride in figuring out how a design critique meeting would best serve our work.
The dream: designers in the same room, giving feedback and collaborating in real-time - such luxury!
Solution
I was able to help foster a stronger culture of feedback on our design team by pitching the idea of a recurring design critique meeting to my team members and leaders. Through creating a team survey and then hosting an ideation session, we were able to set the parameters together for a formal design critique meeting that met our teams’ needs and ensured buy-in. Through this new team ritual we grew stronger as a team, found new ways to innovate in our work, and became more thoughtful presenters of how we were arriving at solutions.
Where Did We Start From?
I started by crafting a quick survey to gauge the teams’ current views on adding this standing meeting as a team ritual. I wanted to understand A) what the teams baseline understanding of what a formal design critique is, B) their expectations of the way this meeting could serve our team, and C) understand the teams’ current view on our feedback culture.
While my survey was deployed and collecting team perspective, I set out to outline what my own goals for a design critique meeting were, how I felt this meeting could fill a void in the current design process on our team, and research design leaders at other orgs who had published their own meeting formats. I distilled all of these parameters down into a small presentation for the team and scheduled a team brainstorm to discuss the results of our survey, and present a format that addressed everyone’s ideas.
Defining Purpose and Goals
“The purpose of a Design Critique is to unblock and ideate, not solve the problem on the spot – that will fall on the individual to figure out post-meeting.”
As a team, I facilitated a conversation that aligned on publishing a meeting purpose, and defining four goals we hoped to achieve through holding this new team ritual.
Goal 1: Personal Improvement
By presenting our work, we are challenged to think through how we arrived at solutions and learn how others approach the same problem from an alternative perspective. Design Critiques help us hone our presentation skills as designers, and challenge us to articulate the problem and our current solution*.* Explaining our design thinking is a skill that will continue to be critical in our careers.
Goal 2: Team Transparency
To keep up on what the rest of the team is working on. Team Critiques force us to take a brief pause, and focus for a short while on a new subject. This can energize and inspire us while informing us on what our teammates are working on.
Goal 3: Pressure-test design process
Seeing others explain their work (and use Figma) helps us all learn new ways of working. Team Critiques help us tighten the processes we all use and infuse new ideas into how we work individually.
Goal 4: Team Growth
Collaboration is not only beneficial for level-ing up our design skills but also for bringing us together. We become stronger and more empathetic as a unit when we have these experiences as a group.
After holding our very first design critique meeting as a team, I received encouraging feedback from our team suggesting that we were on the right path. This was a moment that felt good for us as a team!
Expansion to “Creative Critique Meeting”
In January of 2023, our team because working closer with Reforge’s video production team in an effort to produce more innovate outputs. We were interested in bringing more animation, video footage, and dynamic elements to our content. We began inviting our video production team members to our critique meetings and in an effort to be inclusive changed the name of our meeting to the Creative Critique Meeting.
Innovative new outputs from the video production team started appearing more at our critique meetings, giving designers and producers a chance to work more closely and inspire further collaboration.
Modes of critique
After In collaboration with Tiffany Chen, we brought in a framework designed to help bring some clarity around the types of feedback we were in need of. This framework, “Modes of Critique” is something Tiffany worked with during her time at Ideo.
Through delivering a framework approach to the types of feedback, we were able to operate with a common knowledge.
I added a “type” filter to our Critique Request form which enabled the team to assign a type of feedback they were looking for, relative to our Modes of Critique operating framework.
This enabled us to quickly understand what type of feedback was being requested for that specific piece of work.
Meeting framework
As part of our meeting expansion to the Creative Critique Meeting, when we welcomed in new team members from the video production team, I applied the double diamond framework to our landscape of work to help frame the context of where this meeting best serves us. This was the final product that I shipped to the team for their use.
Maintenance
I believe that over time, any team ritual stagnates and keeping up with hygiene is important. It can be as simple as taking a pulse check on how the team is still feeling about the ritual, and understanding the ways in which you may have, in time, navigated away from your original goal. Teams evolve, folks come and go, and the culture of a standing design critique must also be subjected to moments of feedback.
Putting together quick surveys is one method I found helpful in ensuring the team still felt empowered and aligned around the our bi-weekly meeting, and also a lever to continue improving the critique and making sure it still was serving us.
Giving the team a periodic check-in and chance to provide feedback on how the meeting was serving them was a chance for us to make changes, for me to get better at facilitating, and to ensure we were maximizing our time together.
Reflection
I’m really proud of the time and leadership invested, and the evolution of this meeting for our design team at Reforge. In addition to all the ways a well-oiled feedback engine can serve any design team, what I learned is that culture and team health is often the result of taking action and opening dialogue.
I believe it’s well worth any design team’s time to understand what role team a formal critique meeting can serve on their team. By setting a process in place for how and when feedback rituals serve you, and having team alignment on the type of feedback that is needed in specific situations, each designer is empowered to do better work.
