As a UX team grows and scales to meet the needs of a business, so do the team’s internal challenges. This is especially true with things like team communication, having a shared understanding of what good quality looks like, and simply ensuring that what your users see is consistently awesome. 

Even with stuff like pattern libraries and the likes of Experience Architects doing their thing, a team of about 8+ designers can find it hard to design holistically and know what’s going on all of the time. 

Folks get focused on their output and silos emerge. That’s just the way things go. And in highly-entrepreneurial environments where teams are empowered and given a fair amount of autonomy (ahem, like at most tech companies), what sometimes emerges is a fragmented end user experience. 

I’ve found that having regular collaborative design (CoDesign) sessions can be incredibly helpful. It gets folks who don’t traditionally have insight or input into other projects to gain and provide just that. 

It also helps build a sense of collegiality and shared ownership within the team. That's incredibly important! 

I’ve tried to capture a few thoughts about hosting these types of sessions. Some goals and logistical considerations that come to mind include: 

• We generally do an hour every week. I try to not calendar mid-week and avoid stressful times. The goal is to stay relaxed, but focused. 

• 3 - 4 designers tops. Anything more than that, and it becomes a bit unwieldy. Also, the designers attending shouldn't necessarily be working on the same stuff. Actually, it helps if they're not to provide more of an outsider's perspective. 

Everyone gets about 15 – 20 minutes to:

• Generate ideas for a problem that they're trying to solve. 

• Present work-in-progress for feedback. This is both about the content and design rationale, as well as presentation style. 

• Talk about process issues and blockers. A lot of this is just straight-up mentorship on the part of the more senior-level designers in the room, but the ovearching goal is to enable a group discussion so that everyone learns. The trick is for it not to turn into a bitch session. That's the facilitator's job. 

By the way, a lot of this should involve each individual clearly articulating the design problem at hand first (i.e., Why are we doing this? What is the goal? What do we expect a solution to accomplish?) Recognizing that proposed solutions are a hypothesis is important.

And what's cool, is that after a few sessions, the folks in the room will have more and more context. So, Designer X knows more about Project Y and can contribute in more meaningful ways moving forward, etc. 

For managers and team Leads, considerations in terms of facilitation include: 

• Make sure everyone understands that they don't need to be totally buttoned-up and have everything solved ahead of time. This should be a safe space to collaborate and ideate with your peers. 

• If there's a problem statement, have everyone jot down an idea first to get some skin in the game. Less random brainstorming. (There's lots of good, recent research why groupthink brainstorming isn't all that it was thought to be, BTW). 

• Make any critiques about the work, not the individual. No-brainer here.

• Let their peers judge, not you. The trick is to not to come across as the expert because you're the most senior person in the room or whatever. 

• The designer still owns the solution and the responsibility of executing on the idea. Leaders should help them refine their ideas. 

• And of course, be flexible. Like with anything else, iterate on the meeting format to optimize what works best for the group.

At the end of the day, a UX team is probably the only group within an organization discussing these holistic, common thread experiences across projects. CoDesign sessions not only level-up your team members' skills, but they also uncover potential gaps and opportunities that product roadmaps and spreadsheets can't. 

Calling that stuff out is a huge part of our jobs as UXers, after all. 

Marc