Key Takeaways from "Meetings won't get your teams aligned — try this 90-minute format instead":
- Words alone aren’t enough for real co-creation: Relying only on verbal descriptions leads to misalignment, as each team member imagines something different. Visualizing ideas is crucial.
- Endless "alignment" meetings usually result in circular conversations: Teams think they're collaborating but often aren't moving forward, losing clarity and genuine collaboration.
- The Design Studio format is a better alternative: In 90 minutes, a cross-functional team co-creates solutions through structured sketching, sharing, and iteration, reaching clarity and alignment much faster than through traditional meetings.
- Step-by-step Design Studio process:
- Setup & Framing: Clearly define the problem as a "How might we..." question and provide sufficient context.
- Rapid Drawing: Everyone sketches ideas individually in a time-boxed setting, enabling people to visualize flows, screens, and states.
- Presentation & Iteration: Team members share their sketches, then go for another round, building or merging ideas collaboratively.
- Voting & Trend Alignment: Dot votes are cast for the most resonant features or concepts, helping the team visually identify promising patterns.
- Synthesis & Decisions: The group discusses and synthesizes the trends, combining usability, viability, value, and feasibility to shape the best solution.
- Co-creation can be messy, but core principles keep momentum: The format encourages shared ownership, humility, curiosity, and rapid decision-making.
- Design Studio results in faster, better alignment: Teams are surprised at how productive 90 minutes can be compared to weeks of back-and-forth, often landing on superior solutions that combine everyone’s strengths.
- True clarity arises from seeing and reacting to tangible ideas—drawing is essential: Alignment happens when teams can point at, ask about, and iterate on real visual concepts, not just abstract conversation.
Summary:
Design Studios provide a fast, effective way for product teams to co-create and align, replacing inefficient alignment meetings with structured, visual collaboration. This method transforms abstract ideas into concrete solutions with shared ownership, producing better results in less time.