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 rituals

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 #public-channel and in its main thread. This helps others to contextualize the topic
• Utilize Slack Huddle if you're blocked
• Reply promptly, ideally within an hour

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

Team rituals

Before deciding on anything, it's crucial to involve every designer on your team. That alone can make or break your success. Here's what we've decided and worked for us:

• Design Hour
• Dedicated lead(s) per project
• Weekly 1:1s
• Async Mode

Design Hour

This is separate from company Office Hour. This is where your team decide on what to do during the overlap, for example:

• Ideation sessions
• Design critiques
• Daily stand-ups
• Daily check-outs:
  • Highlight things that needed immediate attention

Dedicated lead(s) per project

How you define your project is entirely up to you and your team. This promotes:

• Ownership
• Accountability
• Point of contact(s)

Weekly Bi-weekly 1:1s

This non-negotiable, use this time to understand and unblock your team. Weekly 1:1s is sacred and will help you gain better insights on individual morale & motivations. Over time, we reduced it to bi-weekly.

Async Mode

When you're in a full remote settings, most of your time won't overlap, e.g Bangkok -> Warsaw. Here's how we collaborate and reduce frictions:

• When @tagging in Figma, always provide as much context as possible
• Use video to convey complex ideas, e.g. Loom
• Broadcast any changes that might affect others on #design channel, e.g component library.

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 start with these two:

• Non-negotiables -> Communications
• Team rituals -> Design Hour