FigJam and Warm Fuzzies: How Our FigJam Board Helps Our UX Research Team Connect and Celebrate Each Week
ORIGINALLY POSTED ON LINKEDIN ON MARCH 22, 2023
The Verizon Connect UX Research weekly agenda board!
How Our FigJam Board Came to Be
I literally just came from our Verizon Connect UX Research team's weekly meeting to write this article. Why? Because I have a huge, proud, happy smile on my face, like I usually do when I get to spend time with this amazing team!
And that time is precious, not just because it's with a stellar team, but also because working in a remote environment requires us to get creative in fostering great working relationships with our teammates.
As such, we've been experimenting with ways to check in with one another. While gaining more on-the-job training in my manager position, I've also read up on many frameworks for 1:1s, team meetings, and project kick-offs.
Here's a great article about check-ins and check-outs, a cool piece on OKRs and goal-setting, and a fantastic series of articles on team meetings:
an HBR article on how to run them effectively
a Slack article on 6 types of meetings,
and a ModelThinkers article on the 7Ps framework
There's so much info out there! And the more info that I took in, the more questions buzzed around in my head. What structures work best for our team? What tools should we be using? How do we track success?
So, I decided to do what any researcher with a background in cognitive psychology does! I took it back to my fundamental guiding 3 Cs: Cognition, Culture, and Creativity.
Cognition
First, I thought about the cognitive model of a meeting. Not to get tooooo philosophical, but I asked myself, what is a meeting? I had been so busy trying to shape our weekly meetings and anticipate needs when, really, all our team truly needed was a time and a place to chat.
Finding the time wasn't easy, given that our 16-person team spans two countries and four time zones. But I blocked off a time that would work for mostly everyone and sent out a calendar invite.
Finding the space was even more challenging, given our largely remote environment. We could have used all sorts of team and project management tools to organize that space, but I didn't want to go down my usual analysis paralysis spiral. I just wanted something simple. And UX already had the answer for me.
Culture
If you work in UX, you're extremely familiar with online, cloud-based, collaborative whiteboard tools like FigJam! It has a ton of templates to use for all sorts of projects (and we're using so many of them in our workflows!), but the key selling element of its flexible design is that it allows for team members to jump onto a blank page and create things together from scratch. So we started there!
Creativity
To give our meeting some form, I listened to our team share updates naturally. I found 4 themes that we collectively needed or wanted to communicate most often. From there, I simply created 4 boxes on a white page. These have turned into 4 blank spaces in which our team creatively plays each week. These started out as sandboxes, but since beginning this little experiment, our team has turned them into beautiful sandcastles that have led to increased communication, collaboration, productivity, and teamwork!
Here’s more information on what those 4 blank spaces are, and what they provide for our team!
Box 1: Checking in with team memes!
Box 1 is all about checking in with the team. We're a bunch of Millennials and Gen Zers, and, yes, we speak in memes! Without going on a whole anthropological spiel about how fascinating that is, I've noticed that posting a meme each week helps us connect to each other and serves as a great way to take a quick pulse of team status, health, attitudes, and top-of-mind concerns. We started sharing classic memes, and now, we've gotten to a point where our researchers are even creating their own memes to speak to inside jokes that bring light to what our team is experiencing! It's a great snapshot of our team's culture, and a fun way for our team to get creative with self-expression!
Box 2: Celebrating wins and each other with snaps!
Box 2 is all about celebrating the small wins along the way that sometimes go unnoticed (even by ourselves). By sharing life and work updates and celebrations, we motivate each other throughout the collective research process, which, in some cases, takes weeks to months to yield tangible results. It also helps us stay connected as a team and celebrate what we each bring to the table. You may have heard about these kinds of practices as providing each other with "warm fuzzies" (shoutout to John Horn High School Muhl students!) or "snaps"! Shoutout to Alexa Carleo, a researcher manager on our team, who came up with integrating the idea of the Snap Cup into our weekly meetings (it's a fun way to provide feedback from a classic movie, Legally Blonde 2)!
Box 3: Sharing the business strategy!
Box 3 is all about making time to communicate feedback that we're getting from stakeholders, and what we're learning from our executive leadership teams! Because our researchers work on exploratory discovery work, as well as very tactical research projects at feature and function levels, it can be hard to connect the dots of our day-to-day to the broader, longer-term vision of our company. This box lets us get updates both ways. We have an opportunity to talk about the results we're seeing from our own strategic efforts, and we can frame them within the context of these larger pass-downs from our leaders. Shoutouts to our leaders Alicia Nachman and John Molamphy for doing a really incredible job on those strategic communications for our Experience Team and entire Verizon Connect Product team respectively, and in the process, leading us to boost our collective company understanding of the strategy in a measurable, positive way!
Box 4: Helping each other through the week!
Box 4 is all about asking each other for help on any number of things! Our team has used this space to get feedback on anything from voting on new Slack channel names to practicing formal presentations to executive leaders. This process has helped the team get even more efficient; teammates are planning swarms and workshops to optimize this time, as well as quickly recognizing what we can easily take offline and discuss in other spaces. (Shoutout to Customer Focus champion, thought leader, and close collaborator, Susan Michael Sørensen, who recently used this to run a brainstorm with us for a quick check-in on top research themes!)
Being able to cover these questions also helps us knowledge-share across the team, covering everything from research best practices on particular methodologies to key developments in each member's area of expertise within our products. It's a real joy to see the team come together and support each other, and thus, share in each other's work and wins!
Conclusion
It took a while for us to find this rhythm! For context, our first board is dated Feb 16, 2022, and the examples posted above are from today, March 22, 2023!
In that time, five of our team members were promoted into manager roles, and their leadership and voices have been huge catalysts to us feeling like a solid, one-brain research team! A special thank you to Colin Gallagher, Colin Smith, Orla Mc Kinney, Alexa Carleo, and Stephen Doerfler, Ph.D. for all of your hard work!
After having run these meetings for over a year and bringing this stellar management team together, I no longer worry about the state of our team meetings. I realize that we are actually, and organically, incorporating elements from all of the meeting best practice articles and resources listed above!
We are meeting consistently, staying in touch throughout the week while using this board as a touchpoint, communicating up-to-date information every week, developing and strengthening team cultural practices over time, and celebrating each other's hard work, all while working in different locations and time zones.
Most importantly, we're doing all of this in what feels like a safe, creative, hilarious space, a time when we can all come together, have a laugh, share amazing life and work updates with one another, and celebrate not just our accomplishments, but our humanity, and our identity as a team.
Thank you to our managers, as well as our entire team (shoutouts below!), for making our team meetings something that I always look forward to, and something I proudly beam about each week!
Our incredible teammates! Paul Boshears, PhD Andrew Pringle Stephanie Baione Mimi Lu Menna Saleh Lilit Sargsyan Ariel B. Cole Kelcey Little Iris Barrera, UXC Brock Rozich, PhD