A Guide to Successful Design Meetings

How to get the best out of design meetings in a practical step by step guide.

Design is paramount in next-level software development. We can say that a few years ago our role was limited to deliver screens for production. Nowadays, with the maturation of the area, designers are expected to have increasingly refined soft skills, gaining more responsibilities through the whole product cycle, often assuming roles of great importance within the teams.

One of the challenges that arose with these new requirements was dealing with complex communications, added to technical and client management responsibilities. Considering it, a key skill in this career evolution journey is mastering and getting the best out of meetings, knowing how to start a meeting, giving and receiving information, discussing ideas, and at the end, assuring that everything discussed was properly aligned and understood by everyone. All of this adds up to superb meeting management.

After realizing the importance of this skill, I decided to go deeper into the subject. Through a lot of research and observation of successful meetings it was possible to identify tools and behaviors that allow us designers to have impeccable communication with our customers. The idea of this article is to approach methodically some of these studies, bringing a step by step of what has been learned so far to get the best out of design meetings.

The basic steps for every meeting

Before we get started with our step by step, it is important to highlight that there are infinite types of meetings and each one has its own characteristics and goals. Design teams usually have all kinds of meetings, such as design critique meetings with the design team, technical validation meetings with the dev team, handoff meetings, management meetings, retrospective meetings, all types of meetings with customers, and the list goes on and on.

So how can we create a step by step for so many different formats?

After researching and observing many successful meetings, it was possible to detect a pattern common to most of them, even though each one has its own peculiarities. What happens is that they start and end in the same way overall, and what changes is the content to be treated in each of them, but the technics are very similar from one to another. From that point, this meeting guide is based on steps common to most of them.

Step 1: Know

In order to hold a meeting, it is important to know who will you be talking to. This does not mean knowing the individual’s personal life, but having at least an idea of their role in the company that they work, what is their level of technical knowledge, and what is their context in the project. This will give you a better view of who you are dealing with and what language is most appropriate to use, so everyone can have a good understanding of the matter.

For collecting this kind of information you can talk to your co-workers who already know the person or even taking a moment at the beginning of the meeting to introduce yourself and get to know them better. This step is only necessary for first meetings.

Step 2: Connect

Starting a meeting in a friendly way usually makes the attendees and even ourselves feel more comfortable and confident to speak. It is a way to break the tension and seriousness of business meetings and make the conversation lighter, but being careful not to leave professionalism behind.

So, depending on the level of proximity with the attendees, ask how they are doing, how the weekend went, or any comments that you find hearty but compatible with the moment. One of the most important skills of designers is to develop empathy. A good tip that can help you with that is to connect with people by building a Rapport, which is a great technique for having a harmonious connection with someone else.

Nevertheless, not every meeting needs the Connect moment, as some of them are routine and with people that we have constant contact with during our workdays. So, this step is not mandatory but certainly helps with the humor of the moment.

Step 3: Align

Alignment is a brief moment at the beginning where we talk about the goals of the meeting and what the outcome should be so that everyone is on the same page.

As designers usually have many meetings during the week, it is important that each one of them has a clear purpose and that they will have an impact on our results. So the alignment is for everyone to focus on the main objective and don’t waste time discussing non-priority matters.

In a design syncs with the customers, for example, a tip is to always list the features that will be covered at the meeting before start talking about them.

Step 4: Information Exchange

This is the step that varies from one meeting format to another. Sometimes we will be receiving information, at other times we will be presenting something, and at other times we may also be discussing a specific matter.

In Briefing meetings, for example, the customers bring us their needs and problems that they have dealt within their projects. In these types of meetings we are receiving information, and it is of utmost importance that we are able to capture all the details. For such, there are some techniques to improve our listening skills, like the Active Listening method.

In presentation meetings, the first thing to do is to provide a context summary about the approached matter, this is important to ensure that everyone is on the same page. About the presentation, the goal usually is to provide a progress update on the work we have done so far or to present the final result of a certain feature. In any of the cases, it is essential to be prepared for the meeting, since we need security on the content covered. If you believe it would help, it is always good to train the presentation before the meeting so that your thoughts and ideas are well organized and you have better control over the shared content.

Step 5: Clarify and Discuss

Clarifying and discussing moments usually happen after the Information Exchange, but depending on how long it takes, they can also occur during the speeches. The idea of this step is to delve into the shared information, either by asking questions to clarify unclear points or by discussing specific topics in order to reach a common sense.

People will hardly give you all the information you need, so asking additional questions to improve understanding is essential in order to have everything well aligned and clear between everyone. The right questions at the right time can be crucial and come with practice.

For moments of discussion, it is extremely important that designers know how to explain technically why their decisions were made or why they have a certain opinion. It not only facilitates the understanding of their arguments but also shows work credibility.

Step 6: Sum Up

We can say that a good meeting indicator is when we approached all the main topics and everything is clear and aligned for everyone, so the goal of this step is to make sure it all happened. It involves offering back to the speaker what you understood from what was discussed and decided during the meeting. Thereby checking either your understanding and the customers are correct and resolving any areas of confusion or misunderstanding. It also helps to confirm that you didn’t miss anything.

Step 7: Next Steps

Finally, the Next Steps is a way of ending the meeting with an overview of what tasks will be worked on in the upcoming days so that everyone knows about the project’s follow-up. It is of great importance to know how to manage the expectations of customers and other attendees so as to avoid bad surprises in a near future.

Good practices

Take notes

You should always take notes during any meeting. You can’t rely on your memory to remember important details or discussion points. Even just a broad outline of what was discussed can be helpful.

One technique that can be useful if taking notes during the actual meeting is not convenient, or even if you were only able to jot down a few things, is to make some notes immediately after the meeting. If you’ve taken a few notes during the meeting, and then you take five to ten minutes afterward to flesh those out and make note of any other ideas that come to you, you’ll be less likely to forget something important.

Don’t miss any information

In case something is not clear to you during someone’s speech, avoid pretending to understand as much as possible. Letting information pass can be really harmful in the future, causing rework and even loss of people’s confidence. Some examples of non-directive clarification-seeking questions are:

• “I’m not quite sure I understand what you are saying.”
• “I don’t feel clear about the main issue here.”
• “When you said .…. what did you mean?”
• “Could you repeat?”

Post-meeting summary

In order to make sure that everything discussed is aligned and to have everything registered, a great tip is to write and share a post-meeting summary with the attendees, which is basically a document describing all the decisions made and topics raised up. Of course, this is not necessary for all the meetings we do, but for key meetings, it can be an incredibly useful tool.

A visual help

Last but not least

These steps are the recipe for us to get successful meetings, bringing positive results to the project. Just keep in mind they are not a general rule, but a guide. Depending on the type of the meeting, some of the steps may not even happen, as well as they may happen in different orders, for example, the Sum Up can occur divided into pieces during the Information Exchange phase in long meetings where the topics covered are concluded little by little.

The secret is to stay open to explore new formats and ideas that improve the efficiency of the data given and received at the end of a meeting. As a result of good communication, we not only have the assurance that our work is considering everything aligned with the attendees, but we also gain trust and confidence in the work we are doing.