Why we’re merging our 2 weekly crits into one, a set of labels that says how much a piece of feedback weighs, the debate those labels started, and 4 books on giving and taking notes.
For a while now my team has run 2 crits a week: a live one on Tuesday, and a silent one on Thursday, where people review work on a shared board and leave notes in place of talking it through. This week our design leaders proposed merging them into one, and I don’t think that’s controversial to anyone. People were waiting for “their” day to bring work, and with product managers and our marketing designers starting to join, one predictable time works better for everyone. The presenter now picks live, silent or a mix when they sign up, so the host knows how to run the session, and every crit gets a dedicated board of its own.
What I asked the group to protect is the part that silent crit was aiming for and rarely got. The value of a silent crit is the riffing, and maybe “silent” was the wrong word for it all along. What I’d love to see more of, especially as more people come in, is someone taking a designer’s work and starting to mess with it and iterate on it right there. That kind of in-the-moment response almost never happens today, and getting there needs designers with a stronger point of view on what they see, who react to it and change it.
What I’d love to see more of is someone taking a designer’s work and starting to mess with it and iterate on it right there.
The second proposal started the best debate of my week. One of our design managers suggested we label every piece of feedback with how much it weighs:
- Do. The change is required, and you come back to the channel to show how you addressed it.
- Try. A strong recommendation, like “use the design system component here.”
- Consider. An idea worth exploring, and entirely optional.
Their example was a recent homepage review where a lot of feedback meant as “consider” landed on the designer as “do.”
A senior designer pushed back right away with a question I loved: whose Do do you have to do? If a product manager with no context on the project says Do, can you ignore it? A Do from your own manager probably binds you, so what happens when it conflicts with someone else’s? Without an answer to that, a Do turns into a go or no-go decision through the back door.
Another designer had worked this way before, on a team of 6. At the end of each crit the group agreed together which notes were Do, Try or Consider, and some of the Dos blocked a launch. About 1 in 20 notes ended up as an absolute Do. The value, they said, came from building shared taste, and they weren’t sure it would scale to a team our size.
Then the conversation turned. A designer called out something I’ve been thinking about ever since: even if we never fully agree on the labels, shared language helps us see when something doesn’t have agreement. Today every note is take it or leave it. With labels, a disputed Do shows up as a point of contention the team can work through, in place of a note someone decides to ignore without telling anyone. We went from arguing about who gets to issue a Do to agreeing the labels are worth trying, even if adoption is messy at first. (Someone pointed out it would fail before it launched if we called it the Do-Do framework, so the name is still open.)
Two habits already on the team make the labels work better. A senior designer posts what they heard after each crit, along with what they are and aren’t changing because of it. They call it a discipline of what you’ve heard, and it closes the loop without turning crit into an approval step. And moving your work out of your own file and onto the crit board forces you to think about what your story is and what you want feedback on, which makes the notes you get back sharper.
The open question is visibility. As more teams come into crit, it’s only going to get harder for each one to see what the others are designing, and a weekly status spreadsheet can’t show the work itself. I owe our design leaders a follow-up on that. Marketing designers joining our crits is also the first step toward the cross-functional review I wrote about in A Banner Isn’t Good Enough.
Four books on giving and taking notes.
The shelf
