Design Team Offsite

Overview

By Q3 2019, the design team had grown from 3 to 8 people. In an effort to continue to strengthen the team culture and foster the collaborative, low-ego environment that I believe great design thrives in, I held a team off-site that combined work sessions with team building social activities. We convened for a full day at a co-working space a few blocks from our NYC office and worked through 3 activities, breaking together for lunch and happy hour at the end of the day.

Activity One: Personal Journey

Since over half of the team had been at Quartet for less than six months, I started the day off with an activity that would warm folks up and get their creativity flowing as well as help us all get to know each other a bit better.

Activity Two: Team Retrospective

After a quick coffee break, we started with part one of a retrospective, reflecting on the experience of being a designer and/or researcher at Quartet.

We affinity mapped the individual post-its team members had created, and then dot voted on the ones which felt the most important to address in the short term. Then we went to Eataly for lunch!

The two highest voted concepts were 1.) creating a team “toolbox” to share techniques, templates, and other successful sample artifacts and 2.) sharing more about human centered design with the broader company.

Below: Collaborative workshop between Design and QuAD, one of Quartet’s Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) for teammates with visible or invisible disabilities.

Activity Three: Design Team Purpose

The final activity was a brainstorm and discussion around what role the team currently plays and aspires to play at Quartet. The goal was to discuss and align within the team and then use that alignment to create a stronger design team “brand” within the company. The purpose statements are displayed publicly on our team confluence page. We’ve also revisited them and iterated on them and have used them to frame subsequent team retrospectives as well as team goals.