Lessons in Building Remote Design Team

Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate to work in fully remote environments. While it’s liberating, it also comes with real challenges.

In this post, I’ll share some key learnings and lessons from building high-performing remote design teams.

It took a lot of experimentation and failures to reach what worked for us. Here are the principles and frameworks I’ve used to build remote design culture across two different companies.

In my experience, there are two primary things that you should consider:

• Non-negotiables
• Team-Level Processes

Let's start with the non-negotiables.

Non-negotiables

This may apply to any work settings, but they’re especially critical for remote teams and should be communicated to new or potential hires.

• Office hour
• Communications standards

Office Hour

This is a must in any remote team. There needs to be a shared time window where most of the team overlaps, this means every team member must be available and respect the selected time range as Office Hours regardless of where they are in the world.

Communications

In a full remote settings, clear and open communications should be your team's operating principles.

We use Slack as our main communication tools but any team messaging tools should work:

• Always communicate in #teamchannel and in its main thread. This helps others contextualize the topic. Remember: in startups, everyone is involved in something one way or another so this will come in handy.
• If you're blocked, don't wait. Call that person via Slack Huddle. If he/she is not available, schedule a meeting.
• Do not leave anyone hanging for more than an hour, always reply back. And if you're not available, schedule a meeting.

Having these non-negotiables enforces org-wide accountability and avoids confusion by increasing coordinations.

Team-Level Processes

Before anything else, it’s crucial to involve every designer on your team. That alone can make or break your success. Here’s what worked for us:

• Design Hour
• One lead per project.
• Weekly 1:1s
• Async Mode

Design Hour

This is separate from company Office Hour. This is where you set your internal design team ritual. For example:

• Weekly Show & Tell
• Individual or Group feedback session
• Review and unblock design decisions
• One fun thing you can do: Pick 1 member each week and decide to work in their timezone

One lead per project

Assigning one lead per project (regardless of their seniority, a Junior Designer can be a project lead too with a bit of guidance!) is critical. This ensures that:

• Everyone including other teams knows who to go to for context
• The lead have more ownership of the project
• Increases individual project accountability

Weekly 1:1s

As design leader this non-negotiable, your job is to support and unblock your team members. Weekly 1:1s is sacred and will help you gain better insights on individual morale & motivations. Protect this time.

Async Mode

Most of your time won't overlap. Here's how we reduce frictions:

• When @tagging someone in Figma, always provide context and be as clear as possible
• If a member is not available, record Loom or screenshots
• If a component or flow changes, broadcast the update clearly in the shared design channel

Just to be clear. This is not to replace collaborations, but to enable it without delays and guessing.

Final Notes

There are more nuances and details to this, especially around onboarding, design consistency, and documentation. But if I had to narrow it down, I’d always start with these two categories:

• Non-negotiables
• Team-level process