Thoughts

Huddle up – Old school, but effective collaboration technique.

by Erik Briones | March 3, 2020

I consider today as a win for our product team. We are going to present our initial draft/mockups – an updated look on one of our main modules for the website.

I have been working on them for a couple of days now. The smaller team within the product team consists of me, the User Interface designer, one Front-end, one Back-end and one Project manager.

We have met with our internal client already, our Editorial team, and they have given feedback on what they want for the particular module. They have pointed out the flaws, as well as what works for them.

After that meeting, the smaller product team huddled and decided it was time for me to create the mockups based on the feedback from our internal user.

Fast-forward to today, where we gathered and reviewed the mockups before presenting it to the larger group tomorrow.

There were no fancy digital kanban systems used or prototyping tools. We gathered around my desk, and I opened up my mockups in Figma, and then we reviewed what works – in terms of the usage, feedback from the internal user, the capability of front-end, as well as the back-end considerations.

For me, it was a big win. Collaboration in a huge organization is essential but often missed, as groups go in their safe places all the time. Instead of collaborating, giving out honest opinion, people often just give small comments in JIRA tickets, or in the extreme end log in a huge case of why something is not working. Everything lost in translation.

Good old huddle, face-to-face, hashing out of what works and what doesn’t is still very effective for in-house teams.

Excited for tomorrow