The Case for Redesigning How Your Team Works
For people managers, the constant churn of modern work life has made the job harder than ever. But that instability also removes the excuse of “that’s how we’ve always done it.” With no baseline normal to preserve, managers have a rare opening to rethink their own roles and daily rhythms. The goal is to turn the job you have into the job you want, starting with how you spend your time and how your team collaborates.
Start by Saying No to Meetings
At the start of 2023, Shopify cleared out all recurring meetings with more than three people, gradually reintroducing only the most essential ones. The intent was to give employees uninterrupted time for focused work. Because Shopify is fully remote, teams lean on asynchronous collaboration in shared Figma and FigJam files to move projects forward without needing everyone in a live call.
“Our team is distributed across many time zones, so it’s hard to have meetings,” says Sebastian Speier, a Senior UX Manager at Shopify. “Tools that allow us to collaborate asynchronously, we really want to invest in those.”
That kind of move requires honesty about what a manager’s day actually contains. Executives assume managers spend time on big-picture work like driving change and developing people. In practice, managers often get pulled toward operational busywork. Collaboration tools and visual planning can remove some of that drag, but the deeper question is whether the meeting itself is the best way to move work forward. Often it isn't. When you do gather, the focus should shift from transactional updates to building the interpersonal connections that make teams resilient.
Rethink the Feedback Loop
Slow, heavy feedback cycles create whiplash: you try to craft a solution that satisfies everyone, and usually end up with one that pleases no one. A tighter loop helps. Share a work-in-progress screenshot in FigJam so colleagues and stakeholders can annotate directly with stickies and emoji—without forcing the team to interrupt their flow to respond to every comment.
Still, open feedback needs guardrails. Figma Chief Product Officer Yuhki Yamashita cautions against inviting unlimited input on a project. “Soon, the comments are piling on with no end in sight,” he says. “Or worse, folks (especially C-suite) pop into the file with little to no context, drop feedback, then disappear. This phenomenon is sometimes called the ‘swoop and poop.’ Suddenly, you have a fresh round of feedback that needs to be addressed. It can be devastating.”
Teams also need structured space to flag what isn't working. At the startup Super, employees contribute anonymous suggestions during monthly retrospectives. That ritual led to a new bug-reporting system and a weekly 15-minute team session for testing features. “It’s us as leadership asking, ‘How do we get better?’” says co-founder Lindsay Liu. “A lot of the [company’s] optimizations have come about from those retros. It has fostered an environment where everyone feels like they can share.”
Break Out of the Document
Good collaboration rarely resembles everyone frantically sticking notes on a wall. The pandemic showed how limiting that approach can be. A better model is a shared canvas—a single source of truth where ideas are sketched, stickied, and written out in a free-form way that encourages contribution.
Shopify Senior UX Manager Katarina Batina describes starting with a visualization instead of a doc as “breaking your brain,” in a good way. Following the same templates and answering the same questions means “you lose all of the creativity that is expected to come up with really unique ideas,” she says. A visual starting point forces a fresh perspective and often produces more inventive solutions. It also levels the playing field. As Speier notes, when 20 people collaborate, expecting everyone to articulate a vision in a document is unrealistic. A canvas that mixes words with visual elements gives more people a way to contribute meaningfully.
Protect Downtime, On Purpose
Remote work makes connection harder, and that isolation intensifies the sting of hard feedback. “There is an unspoken contract that we will have difficult conversations about work,” says Batina. “Critique has to be hard, detailed, in the weeds. Having to do that, and then turn your camera off and be alone just makes you question your own skill set. You have nothing affirming.”
Her team at Shopify builds in virtual scavenger hunts and other social activities on digital whiteboards to create camaraderie. Speier’s group holds weekly “cool downs” with just-for-fun prompts. This downtime isn't a perfect substitute for in-person interaction, but it provides a necessary balance. “People really like to feel connected to their colleagues in a meaningful way,” Speier says. But “it’s very taxing emotionally and physically to have 100% of your communications with your team be about making your work better.”
When connection is built into the cadence, the painful parts of work feel less personal. Batina recalls the appeal of in-person studio critiques, where you could walk out after an hour of difficult feedback and say to a colleague, “Dope shoes.” Creating moments where work is secondary builds the trust that makes collaboration stronger when it matters.
