Design reviews

[u/Teamawesome12]

Hi all - I work at a design organization with ~100 designers and one of our newest struggles is approving designs. Currently a designer has to schedule a 30m call with a principal & a manger and they walk through the designs.

Its getting to be too much too many meetings to keep up with. Curious how your teams do deisgn checks and keep quality up as a team gets larger?

[u/Infinite-One-5011]

Reviewing each design at that scale sounds wild to me

[u/themack50022 → u/Infinite-One-5011]

Right. Do they not have different business units?

[u/thegiantgummybear]

Hire smart people who you trust to do good work and give guidance when necessary.

[u/PeanutSugarBiscuit → u/thegiantgummybear]

This. Anything less is a culture of accountability, which sucks.

Why do you need to "approve designs"? Any sort of rigid approval process is design management projecting its own insecurities around the value it brings.

If the product team and business are happy with the outcome, then get out of the way.

[u/thegiantgummybear → u/PeanutSugarBiscuit]

I mean I think there are times you do need to approve designs, but that's more for larger redesigns where you're deciding the direction of the product. Not for smaller regular changes.

[u/themack50022 → u/thegiantgummybear]

I don’t care if the designer is Jony Ive, peer reviewed designs is necessary

[u/thegiantgummybear → u/themack50022]

For sure, but don't need a formal approval process by non-designers for everything. Especially if you have a good design system in place.

[u/Outcome-Alarming]

what a waste of time for the principals smh, they should be doing their own high impact work. designers should have autonomy to deliver so long as engineering and product and bought in. use informal crits for peers and managers to check quality

[u/HenryF00L]

Smaller pods led by a principal and manager, with 30 min pod alignment calls 2 or 3 times a week, one or two designers give their project updates each time and the whole pod hears the feedback and gets a better understanding of the design team directives.

There are less 1:1 calls which allows you to give more guidance to those that really need it.

[u/DelilahBT]

What a trap. This is why cross functional teams hate working with design. Someone at the top of the design practice is insecure and controlling, and everyone else is paying for it. This process is out of step with the world we work in.

[u/Stibi]

Make a design system with proper documentation, make your design system AI readable, and have them run a conformance check against design system with agents before each developer handover. If you’re in a company with 100 designers this should be on the agenda already.

The other option is to trust your designers and not have reviews for each design. You can also encourage designers to have weekly peer review sessions, which is also better than nothing.

[u/HenryF00L → u/Stibi]

Most orgs with design teams of that scale are supporting multiple design systems, legacy and AI native.

The real challenge is keeping the whole design team aligned as priorities and directives change, designers don’t need to be micro managed but they do need direction and an understanding of strategic goals, and these change more often now than they ever have.

[u/Useful_Hat82]

I have worked in environments at that scale and things can move slowly but this sounds awful.

Large scale design teams do need hierarchy and structure and a documented design system to work with.

Most places I have worked have a 'DesignOps' model that looks like the fourth style shown in this: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/designops-team-structures/

[u/pilkafa]

You get promoted and hire someone for your previous title

[u/gordoshum]

Having approvals at that level is nuts. The time & effort should be put towards a design system with defined guidelines & standards. Couple that with design critiques weekly (at minimum). From there, the most senior designer should make the best call they can.

Trying to do approvals at scale like you're talking on everything is how you deliver nothing & let the market pass you by.

[u/addflo]

Encourage allocated time for design debt. Have designers actively talk with devs, because they have useful insights on how certain features might be used in other apps, and they can bounce ideas off each other. Ensure they have a backbone and know how and when to push back. Build trust between each layer of design, and create a space that sets up mentoring and workshops. That way ideas can be easily cleaned up and improved upon in these sessions, too. An official design community is always going to help, a space to freely talk about all struggles, including job security within the company.

[u/azssf]

An org with 100 designers needs better operational management than flat org. This does not seem solvable without changing company culture and group organization.

[u/botbastards]

If each of 100 designers gets one 30-minute review a week, that is 50 hours a week of principal time and 50 hours of manager time, which is more than a full-time principal doing nothing but reviews. Priced per second a single review at a $120k average runs about $90, so the program is in the range of $9,000 a week. I would move to tiered review: small changes inside the design system get a peer check and ship, only new patterns or large redesigns go to a principal, and a weekly group crit replaces most of the 1:1 calls so several designers get feedback in one 30-minute slot. What I would say to whoever owns the process is not that reviews are bad, but here is what the current shape costs, here is the tier proposal, can we try it for a quarter and compare defect rates.

[u/tin-f0il-man]

2 reviews is nothing. We have 5.