How we designed the breakout at our product summit so 60 ICs did most of the talking, the 6 rules that made the output usable, and 4 books on gatherings that are worth the budget.
The best 90 minutes of our annual product summit this month were the ones where the leaders said the least. We put 60 product managers, designers and program managers at 8 tables, gave every table the same 3 rounds, and asked the ICs to talk first. What came back was more candid and more useful than anything I could have put on a slide, and I want to pass along how we set it up, because most of it is reusable.
The framing came from a question our most senior product leader put to the planning group: what is the role of designers and PMs in the future, and let’s hear it from the ICs. I took that session on, and the first decision I made was that the breakout would be a research study rather than a team-building exercise. Everything downstream followed from that.
Give every table the same template. One board, 3 rounds, 15 to 20 minutes each. Round 1: walk through the last thing you shipped, from first signal to launch. Where did the time go, where was context lost, and where is AI already helping? Round 2: how do we decide what’s worth building, and what would you need to trust an AI that had read every ticket and interview? Round 3: what does shared responsibility look like next year, where do you sit between “I want to build” and “I’d rather partner closely,” and what should always stay human? Because every table filled in the same map, I could lay 8 boards side by side afterward and count.
Fill one in before you hand it out. I learned this the hard way with the first draft, when my own design leaders couldn’t tell what the blank template was for (I wrote about it in Issue 25). The version that worked shipped with an example table, stickies and all, so every facilitator could see what good looked like before their room filled up.
ICs first, facilitators last, no names on the cards. The first minute of each round belonged to the ICs. Each table picked an IC volunteer as note-taker. The capture cards carried no attribution, and what each table brought back to the big room was 4 anonymous cards: more of, less of, 1 idea for working closer across squads, and 1 question for leadership.
Keep the excitement and the concern. The board said it in so many words: written capture, not a vote. One table brought back “Build!” and “No build!” on adjacent stickies, and that pair turned out to be the most useful thing in the room, because it told us exactly what conditions people were attaching to a yes.
A breakout that only collects agreement has thrown away the part you came for.
Park what the room can’t answer. Any question about structure, team size or reporting lines got written down word for word and routed to the 2 senior leaders who could answer it, labeled with a table number instead of a name. Tooling questions went to an FAQ. Nobody had to speculate, so nobody did.
Close the loop before the glow fades. I read all 8 boards 2 days after we got home and sent a 15-slide summary to our senior leaders by the end of the week, with the room’s questions quoted as written and a date for when the answers would come back in our product leader’s weekly note. The people who spoke up should hear what happened to it before they forget they said it.
What we heard, generalized enough to share: context gets lost between squads far more than inside them, and people find out about overlapping work at demo time. The bottleneck people feel is at the end of the process, in review and QA and the data queue, which complicates any plan that only speeds up the front. And nobody asked for fewer humans in the loop. They asked for earlier ones, specifically engineers in the room from the first signal.
Two more things made the day work, and neither was on the agenda I’d have written a year ago. We opened with the year as people, new babies, an engagement, and photos from summer Fridays, before a single business slide. Then we ran 4 rounds of musical tables with prompts that had nothing to do with work: a favorite photo on your phone, the last time AI gave you something you didn’t ask for, the place that matters most to you, and what made you laugh out loud this week. By the time the breakout started, people had already talked to a dozen colleagues they’d only known as avatars, and the candor in Round 1 came easier for it.
4 books on gatherings that are worth the budget.
The shelf
