Inside the day-to-day of Figma's product design team

Recently, I shared a glimpse into our product design team's process during a webinar on remote critiques and later posted the deck to the Figma Community. A few people asked for more detail, so this is an expanded look at how we work: our meeting cadences, rituals, and the exercises we use to keep everyone aligned.

We've written before about how we built the design team and how we run critiques. What follows is a broader view of our overall design team process, with two important caveats upfront.

The difference between design team and product team

If you have more than one designer, you're part of two cultures at once: the horizontal "design team" and the vertical "product team." Each has its own standups, off-sites, and team-building activities. The horizontal team maintains consistency and quality across the product, while the vertical team ships improvements and deepens expertise in focused areas. Both deserve investment.

The balance between these identities shifts as a company grows. When we had few designers, we banded together to split up workloads. Now, as a mid-stage company with 10 product designers, we see natural tensions: most designers are embedded in product areas, though some cover multiple areas or none at all. Before the pandemic, some designers sat with other designers and others with their engineers. At this size, we're encouraging the team to invest more energy in product team relationships and let the design team process handle the rest.

This article covers the design team process specifically, not our product team process—for more on that, see our material on roadmapping and on PM-designer relationships.

A note on the current moment

Covid-19 has affected teams everywhere. It's important to give each other space when personal life suffers. In our last team meeting, I told the group I expected my own output to drop to maybe 60% of normal, and I encouraged everyone to take mental health days. It's an isolating time, but a healthy team process helps maintain community when organic social connections fade.

Only you can decide if your team is ready for a process shake-up while so much else demands your attention, so please don't read this and immediately think "we should do this." We're sharing how we work for anyone curious. That said, only a few small things here apply strictly to remote work or the pandemic; most of these processes should hold up for remote and in-person teams alike.

Here's the structure for what follows: weekly processes, monthly and quarterly rituals, and eight tips for running similar activities yourself. Jump to whichever section is most useful.

Weekly rhythms

Most of the design team's recurring rituals happen on a weekly or biweekly cadence. The structure is loose enough to accommodate the day-to-day work, but consistent enough that everyone has a regular moment to share, plan, and critique.

Warm up

Every Monday from 9:30–10:00am PT, the design team meets for a light kickoff session attended by product designers, and optionally by research and brand team members. The meeting has four parts, each running between five and ten minutes:

  • Weekend update — Each person shares a quick highlight from their weekend. When on Zoom, one person starts and nominates the next. Even if the updates all sound alike, the tradition matters because it keeps the team connected and starts the week on a positive note.
  • Highlights — Team members go heads-down for a few minutes to reflect on the prior week, review their calendars, and compile notable progress into a Notion doc. The goal is to acknowledge small victories that would otherwise go unnoticed between larger projects shipping.
  • Critique/meeting schedule — Working in reverse order from the weekend updates, each person indicates whether they have a topic for critique and on which day. There are typically two slots (Wednesday at 9:30am and Friday at 2:00pm), with Monday at 4:00pm as a backup or an option to use Slack for asynchronous feedback. Even those without a critique topic share their focus for the week so everyone has ambient awareness of ongoing work.
  • Announcements — The team lead shares company-wide updates and design-specific news, including tactical items like changes to the design system. Announcements are informational; follow-up conversations get routed into the Monday 4:00pm team meeting agenda.

Team meeting

Product designers gather every Monday from 4:00–5:00pm PT to handle team-wide responsibilities. Topics cover things like design principles, critique quality, hiring practices, and quarterly reviews, but can also be timely: one recent meeting addressed how to support other teams during the pandemic.

The agenda is set during the warm-up. If there’s nothing to discuss, the meeting gets canceled — which happens at least once a month. Overflow critique topics can also replace the slot.

These meetings aren’t meant to be driven solely by the design team lead. Productive, healthy teams distribute responsibility for improving their own practices. On this team, many of the best ideas have come from individual designers: contributions included revisiting hiring practices, creating debrief templates with less bias, and rethinking new-hire onboarding.

Facilitating large group discussions has its own challenges. A lead should be careful to avoid groupthink and give everyone a chance to speak. Time-boxing complex topics, hearing feedback one by one around the room, and running written exercises — whether using physical sticky notes or digitally in Figma — can help quieter members contribute.

Critique

Critique sessions run Wednesdays from 9:30–10:30am PT (chosen to suit Europe-based teammates) and Fridays from 2:00–3:00pm PT. Product designers, the VP of Product, and any guests the presenter invites (like a PM, engineering lead, or researcher) attend. Each session reviews two topics, allowing 30 minutes per topic.

Critiques are distinct from formal product reviews. They aren’t for making major product decisions or setting roadmaps. Instead, they use the team’s collective experience to unblock designers, raise quality standards, promote consistency, and build shared context. The tone is meant to feel motivating, not intimidating.

Attendance is optional: all ten designers are invited, but a few typically skip and give async feedback later. Fewer attendees is less of a concern now that sessions happen over Zoom, though that may change when in-person meetings return.

Cooldown

Every other Friday from 3:00–4:00pm PT, the design team meets for a cooldown that bookends the week opposite the warm-up. The sessions break down into three categories:

  • Play — Group games or collaborative building, such as co-creating a Figma board game, drawing each other’s portraits with an unbroken pencil tool, playing bingo with feature requests, creating office signage, or sketching childhood door frames from memory.
  • Chat — Unstructured reflection where the team asks each other how they feel. Done well, this creates safe space for members to admit when they’re tired, confused, or having a hard time. Lately it’s an opportunity to discuss how everyone is adapting to working and living in the same space.
  • Learn — Teaching each other something new, together exploring a competitive product (the team once tried out Drama), or inviting guest speakers. This category has seen less use, partly because the broader company already has Thursday “lunch and learns” covering topics from crossword puzzle strategies to animation basics. Still, it’s a worthwhile channel for unique learning opportunities.

Unstructured time

Beyond the scheduled meetings, the team carves out open-ended moments to connect. In normal office times, this happened spontaneously; now there’s an optional “morning coffee” at 9:00am every day where team members dial in, play music, and chat with no agenda. Conversation comes naturally — topics have included picking new glasses, admiring a coworker’s coffee cup collection, or listening to a shared jazz Spotify playlist.

In the office, the team maintains a tradition of treating new joiners to lunch at SFMOMA, located one block away. That ritual is on hold but expected to restart once everyone returns in person.

Keeping the team connected through rituals

Beyond the day-to-day workflows, the design team gathers regularly to share work, learn, and celebrate. These rituals are lightweight on process but heavy on connection, and they help the team avoid the trap of celebrating people only during onboarding or releases.

Monthly design all hands

A monthly design all hands brings together the entire design organization — not just product designers. Alongside them are brand designers, researchers, motion designers, and design advocates. The format is straightforward: a Figma file is shared a few days ahead, and each participant gets a named slide to populate with highlights from their work over the past month. During the hour, each person gets one to two minutes to present, which is the core of the session. There’s also room for social activities or a deeper project walkthrough, like brand guideline updates.

Offsites

Twice a year the product design team heads out for an offsite: a smaller session in May and a larger one in September. These are distinct from routine team socials and require real planning. Before each, a survey collects topics, interests, and logistics. The smaller offsite is essentially a condensed edition of the larger one — often held in a flexible space or remotely — and serves as a mood check and a chance to dream up ideas.

The larger offsite is a full day of structured activity. A recurring tradition: everyone shares an early career piece of work they find embarrassing. It sets a tone that mistakes are acceptable and highlights how much designers have grown. Sessions are often split into smaller working groups to give everyone a voice within a large team, then reconvened for discussion. As the day progresses, the group identifies what the product design team believes is most important for the company to focus on, and refines those ideas alongside Product and Engineering peers.

Design is everyone’s business

Figma’s mission is to make design accessible to all, and that idea is applied internally. New employees receive The Design of Everyday Things and attend a “Design 101 Workshop.” Anyone outside design is invited to observe a critique session as a visitor, just to learn how designers operate. Visual design training is offered during company maker weeks, and occasional posters are placed around the office to reinforce design vocabulary and concepts.

Recognizing milestones

Celebrations for birthdays and anniversaries are a deliberate investment in community. There’s no standard playbook: past events have included a custom keyboard, a surprise flash mob, personalized coffee mugs, digital animated cards, and handmade cards for hobbies. The goal is to keep supporting teammates after the honeymoon period of joining a company fades — and to counter negativity bias. This behavior is company-wide; multiple teams create digital cards in Figma.

Adapting These Practices to Your Own Team

The activities described here were built for our team’s specific size, structure, and company culture. Copying them wholesale won’t necessarily work elsewhere. Instead, start by assessing your own team’s needs and building processes that fit. If you’re looking to refresh how your team operates, these are the steps we’d recommend taking.

Start With the Gaps

Pick one problem to solve rather than overhauling everything at once. If quality is inconsistent, introduce regular critiques to reinforce good patterns. If the team is disconnected, prioritize more social time. If motivation is low, plan an offsite aimed at reconnecting people to the company’s vision. A focused approach is far easier to implement and sustain.

Define What Makes Your Team Unique

Every team has traits that set it apart. Ask your team how they describe the company to others, then use that language to shape your processes. Look at examples like the team culture at Lyft or Help Scout’s offsite activities—the personality is evident. If you’re stuck, Dropbox’s culture kits and their guide to building creative culture can serve as a starting point. Even asking one another directly can surface what matters most.

Distribute Ownership

Not every team has a dedicated design ops resource. Since we don’t, process ownership is shared across the team, which leads to better outcomes because everyone is invested. If a teammate is seeking leadership experience, let them run critiques for a period, or rotate meeting ownership quarterly. The meetings serve the team, so it’s essential they feel a sense of buy-in.

Build Consistent Routines

Scheduling ad hoc meetings is draining; people can’t predict where to go for certain conversations. A predictable weekly cadence for recurring meetings reduces coordination overhead. Consider branding them—we use “warm ups” and “cooldowns”—to make their purpose clearer and more memorable.

Be Mindful of Timing

Where a meeting falls in the day or week matters. Late Friday afternoons are terrible for critiques—people are tired and checked out. Monday mornings aren’t much better, since work isn’t fresh after the weekend. Time zones and other commitments impose constraints, and sometimes you may need to ask people to move conflicting obligations when first establishing a schedule.

Treat Changes as Experiments

Framing new processes as experiments reduces the anxiety around change. For example, before COVID we debated whether to sit together as a design team or sit closer to our engineering counterparts. Treating the seating arrangements as an experiment gave us permission to try one configuration and assess the outcome with confidence. Always check in collectively to determine whether an experiment is working.

Keep a Single Queue

We maintain a queue in Notion that tracks meeting ideas, critique guests, and rotating note takers. The queue is accessible all week, and we reference it during Monday warm-ups when scheduling. Centralizing action items in one place means nothing slips through the cracks.

Welcome Guests Judiciously

Because we build a collaboration tool, inviting non-designers into critiques benefits both them and us directly. Even for other products, though, hosting guests builds empathy around the complexity of design work. It also prevents the design team from becoming too siloed, balancing internal team culture with alignment to the broader product organization.

Our process is far from perfect. Keeping critiques effective, generating quality Monday meeting topics, and maintaining attendance at social events remain ongoing challenges. Rituals also have a shelf life—they need regular reinvention to keep people engaged. We hope that sharing how we work is useful, whether you’re iterating on a stale process or introducing structure for the first time. We’d love to hear what your team does, so reach out to us or share on Twitter with #designteamprocess.