Team alignment

Crafting quality workshop

Inspired by a colleague's successful workshop, I facilitated a session for my team to reflect on our past experiences and envision our future. We aimed to establish a shared understanding of how we want to collaborate and deliver products. Our goal at the end of the workshop was to create a document outlining our team's quality standards and the steps we'd take to achieve them.
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Participants

Product designer
Tech lead
FE and BE engineers
Senior product manager

Workshop tools

Lucid Spark
Google forms

Contraints

Distributed team across international time zones

Non-Figma users, needed to be accessible to all participants

Process

Unlike my colleagues with co-located teams, I worked on a global team spread across Boston, Dublin, and Seattle. To optimize our time, I condensed three-hour workshops into one-hour sessions over two days. I leveraged asynchronous communication and created a Google form for pre-workshop feedback, ensuring everyone's voice was heard. I then organized these responses into themes for our scheduled discussions.

Day one

By collaboratively reviewing and reflecting on our answers, we identified common quality themes across each column, deepening our collective understanding of what quality means to our team. The goalfor this sessions was to brainstorm quality definitions and assign responsibilities

Day two

On day two, our objectives were to establish shared team principles and define agreed-upon quality milestones. To clarify roles and responsibilities, we created a visual map outlining our individual tasks
and areas of shared ownership. This helped identify overlaps between product managers, designers,
and engineers.

To clarify ownership and responsibilities, we created a visual map outlining our roles. This helped us identify individual tasks and areas of shared ownership, revealing overlaps between product managers, designers, and engineers.

Results

Following the workshop, we developed a shared understanding of quality and how to achieve it. This collaborative process fostered inclusivity, trust, and accountability across our global team. This strong foundation contributed to our team's success, as evidenced by the successful projects we delivered and improvements in asynchronous communication.