I was fortunate to have worked in a stellar design team at Zopa from 2019–2021 that was filled with incredible professionals, and most notably fantastic rituals. Much of my working style, structure, and ability were honed during that wonderful time.
We were a very tight-knit Design team, which came as a surprise to me as it was my very first experience with a proper team. It set the tone for how I wanted to structure my teams and how I and David Johnson ⓓⓙ created team rituals at ZeroToDesign.
Here are 4 that we live by and I’d suggest you start living by too!
1. Design Critiques/Pitches
We’ll start with the classic Design Crit. Commonly used in actual Design Schools (wild to think people go to school for design, must be nice), this is a staple for Designers across the world and is definitely a key part of our rituals. The reason DCs are so important is that it is an environment to practice what we will ultimately get judged on, how we present our work.
I say to our team and especially our ever-growing stalwart Parina Patel, if you can’t deliver great quality presentations in the safe environment of your understanding colleagues, how the hell do you think you’re going to in front of business stakeholders?
I use Critiques and Pitches as there is a slight nuance between the two. Critiques are great in bringing out feedback on the design decisions you have made, and in getting fresh perspectives from your team. This is especially useful when you have a range of experience in your team, as the feedback will vary and cover many bases.
Pitches are more of a level-up. Assuming your rationale is generally good (which takes a while to get to and will never be 100%), then the focus will shift from just showing your great rationale to presenting your great rationale. We alternate between critiques and pitches to allow time to improve on both abilities.
We do this in Notion by creating weekly slots, labeling the type of session, and then giving slots to presenters:
2. Inspiration Afternoons
This is an amalgamation of rituals that existed at Zopa and at Treatwell where David Johnson ⓓⓙ lead a Design team.
As Designers, we are constantly searching for inspiration. We start our work both from a UX and UI perspective with it. Whether it be checking Dribbble for the latest UI trends, or scouring Mobbin for product examples, there is always a strong desire and need for inspiration from other digital experiences.
These types of inspirations are great, but typically only cover hard skills for us. Soft skills need inspiration too, and that’s where our Inspo afternoons come in. DJ championed this at the start of Z2D in August 2021 to be focused on great presentations on key topics in the world of Product Design.
Here’s how we’d structure our sessions:
- Find a popular 30m-1h presentation
- Create a Figjam board for everyone to make notes
- Watch the presentation for 10–15m
- Discuss for 5–10m
- Repeat until finish
- Star key learnings and create content/systems
It was a really great way to end the week, an enjoyable and inspiring session to learn something new. Over time we started to invite external Designers to the team, some friends from the community, and they always enjoyed the experience and found it insightful. Exactly the goal of the sessions. We even ran one in person when we had a team offsite in Cape Town:
These were some of the best talks we ever watched:
There are plenty more but these 3 were insightful in their own way.
3. Designer Pairing
We have a unique pairing model at ZeroToDesign. It’s what makes our process better for clients, and more enjoyable for designers. Having these check-ins are like having more intimate design crits & pitches.
This originally started out at Zopa, where being one of the junior designers I constantly sought out feedback. I was also very extroverted and impatient, and that led to ‘Pairs’.
It was really just good marketing from me.
A pairing session was a glorified ‘gimme feedback because I'm inexperienced and suck’ session. That’s how it started, but it's evolved to be more multi-faceted and symbiotic now. Pairing gives an opportunity for the sharer to champion, and the feedback-giver to challenge. It helps improve the ability to feedback more effectively and empathetically, be inspired by others’ rationale and most importantly — build rapport and enjoy time with your colleague.
4. Step-back check
This is something everyone in the team should do rather than something that you as as a team. A great Product Designer at Zopa (can you tell I loved it there?) called Laura Sellman was my line manager and an incredible one at that.
While working on a minor UI piece, we started talking about the hierarchy and she suggested a technique:
Take a step back and look at your design.
Stepping back helps you yourself get a different perspective on what you've been working on, and if you’re deep in Figma for a few hours this is very useful.
It’s also very powerful for helping you structure hierarchy, seeing if what you want to highlight is really being highlighted, and understanding what your users are first drawn to.
So simple, yet so effective.
Sakky B
Co-founder, ZeroToDesign
