My Dear Friends of Figma in Foreign welcome back um let me just reintroduce myself I am Natasha I’m a product designer on the Fig Jam team um whether you’re in person or joining in virtually I hope you had a great break catch up with a few friends maybe.
Make new friends it’s always a good time here we literally have also hundreds of figma employees around here today wearing the blue config t-shirt so if you have any questions please reach out to them they’ll be able to help you out if you’re also joining on Virtual we also have fig mates also in the chat so if you ever need any help please also.
Just let them know in the chat and they’ll help you there um this section next session we actually have our fig Jam Champion Katie Chambers here at figma also Andrew Hogan insights lead at figma here to share you a little bit more about how the ways of working and collaborating are changing and so should the way that you collaborate.
Online through both storytelling and live demos you will walk away with more practical steps and inspiration to improve the way that you jam and with that I have one question to pose you all are you working or are you jamming so please welcome to the stage Andrew and Katie foreign.
thanks so much Natasha so as our insights lead Androids are in-house industry analyst he’s bringing us the latest findings reports and insights from across the design industry and I’ve been a fan of Andrew since before getting to know him as an eager consumer of his fig Brew monthly.
Newsletter and I’ve only become more of a fan since getting to know him he’s a fantastic teammate a wonderful human and it’s for all these reasons I am so excited to have Andrew with me today thanks for being here Andrew I am so excited to be here with Katie who I’ve also gotten to know through this process of building this talk.
And I think the screenshot here says it all we have an agenda we have Katie in the corner driving us forward to something great thanks so much Andrew uh and we want this to be a conversation with all of you Andrew and I are up here on stage but we want to bring you into the conversation this will be a little bit.
Different than the other talks you have seen and the fact that we are doing this all live from Big Jam today we are in a fig Jam board right now we have folks that you will see around the board we have Bernie I love Bernie thanks for being here we have Mel on the board we have lots of folks joining us both virtually and here in the room that are.
Also on the board today and we want to bring your questions in the conversation so if you go to figma.com config-2023-vig jamming you’ll see a form where you can submit your questions we have a team that’s going to be bringing those questions into our board today so if you have thoughts you have questions you have feedback you have.
Ideas that you want to share go ahead and fill that out you can take a picture of it we’ll have it at the bottom of the screen and several of our slides here bring those into the conversation you might not have questions now maybe you do but you might have them later so bring this up anytime and bring those into the board with us here with that.
Are we ready to get started who’s excited let’s see any any reactions here Patrick’s ready let’s go thank you all Andrew let’s get going so I’m gonna kick it off with a quick story so we’ve been doing this Research into how work has changed how people are.
Doing work now what are they appreciating what are they struggling with and this story really stuck out at me from an engineering manager to software company they said we just kind of reached decision fatigue we go down one decision fork and then back two levels up and then we’d realize it wasn’t a good.
Decision but that same person described another process where they had an embedded user experience researcher working closely with design a product lead setting the road map an engineering lead coming in early and often and that kind of like helped the shape the scope for that team.
And we thought to ourselves how is it that people are sort of struggling in this gap between uh Cooperative mess and collaborative Magic What’s the difference what are the things that are happening between these two structures and we think that it’s actually maybe even a little harder now to get to collaborative Magic.
That the sort of three forces that we’re all experiencing hybrid work I don’t know if you all know this but there are five times more days worked remotely now in the US than there were pre-pandemic five times just in the course of a couple years that’s dramatically increased the volume of collaborators has increased now Executives want to be.
In the file now Executives want to be participating and we’re also in an infinite work in progress world where great products are never done they sort of go through rounds and rounds of iteration and then you’re done and then you’re not it’s on to the next one because you need to make it better you have feedback to deal with.
People are agreeing with that on the file right there more than any of the other two and I think probably the thing that brings this home most is that somehow it’s a management technique to write a funny Slack to write something clever in zoom and sort of like set the meeting off in the right way to have an emoji reaction in.
Fig Jam that just really like encapsulates what’s going on or maybe a video summary of the work we had people tell us they literally think about how could I write the the best response in Zoom to change the course of this meeting that’s wild to think about it’s not sort of about sitting across from someone.
Anymore now it’s about being with them in this sort of shared virtual space and successfully creating something great so we’re excited to share with you how we think you might be able to approach this a little differently and deal with some of these challenges in fig Jam and the question becomes are you more more creating Cooperative mass or.
Collaborative magic with your team and at figma we like to sometimes call this collaborative magic jamming and my teammate Corey Lee had a great alternative phrasing of this question when he asked are you just working or are you jamming and so I want to tell you a quick story about my first gym now early on in my career I loved going to.
Meetings I was that that girl who liked being in the meeting like sitting around the table with my teammates getting to know them but if I’m being honest they were pretty bad they were boring it was one person sitting at the front usually talking most of the tenured teammates were completely zoned out but I was craving that connection with my team and.
I was always hoping for something a little bit more and it wasn’t until I started at Asana was invited my first brainstorm our researchers Jerry and Beth were putting on a cross-functional brainstorm to reimagine the new user onboarding experience and they wanted to get group folks from across the company together to think of ideas of how we.
Could improve this so I was invited they said sat us down they gave us some guidelines and they handed each of us a stack of Post-its and asked us to capture as many ideas as we could I was a little taken aback if I’m honest I know it’s a little funny now we have all the brainstorms you all probably sit in but it was my first brainstorm so I was.
Like you want me to capture ideas you want to hear my ideas and I can capture as many as you want and they’re like yes and gosh did I capture ideas I captured so many ideas as in everybody else in the room and 20 minutes in we were riffing off each other’s ideas we were throwing all kinds of yesans out in the room.
In short we were jamming we were coming up with ideas that were greater than any of the ideas we alone could bring into that room and to make it all better we walked out of that room and they turned some of those ideas into actual Improvement for users which made it all the sweeter and I was hooked I wanted to figure out how.
To find more of this jamming fitted into my life and figure out how I could create more of this gym for other people so I did whatever I could to learn the art of facilitation get people into these sessions brainstorm together and turn those ideas into action so much though that I became known for having a brainstorm box that would.
People would come to my desk to ask to borrow because I liked brainstorming that much and other people wanted some of this magic so that’s my story how many of you can remember maybe not your first gym but a time that you were really jamming with your team a show of hands show our reactions here and everyone experienced.
A jam before yes so we’re seeing some folks in the great I’m guessing that’s why you’re all here and how many of you would want to create more of that if you could yes hopefully most folks in there and that’s great and I’m seeing lots of reactions here lots of fire they’ll just do it Dustin.
Uh so that’s what we’re gonna do that’s in the next 30 minutes my hope is that we’re gonna give you a jam recipe that you can use to go from just working to jamming more often and the jam recipe all starts with your team and as afternoon was talking about there’s a lot more collaborators.
Involved today so your team might be your functional team like I’m on the marketing team the designer Advocate team but it could also be your cross-functional team like I’m a part of the Fig Jam team and more specifically the engagement team on the big Jam team and I love that team I get to work with cross-functionally with product and.
Engineers and designers and it’s fantastic that’s another team that I have to think about and then I have to think about the organizational team so this could be a group of leads or a group of managers that are specifically focused on a certain part of the organization and for each of these teams it’s important to.
Think about shaping the mindsets by building relationships culture and a sense of belonging with your teammates so that’s the first layer of our jam recipe is shaping these mindsets across each of the teams that you work with then you need to layer on top of that and think about the way that you all work together so how are you working.
What are the day-to-day behaviors that go into working with that group of folks that you’re working with together so that’s the next layer is thinking about encouraging daily behaviors that can start to reinforce those mindsets that you’ve been establishing with your team and then the last step is to put in an.
Intentional constraints to create more focus and flow to make those behaviors go from random events to a more intentional strategy of rituals that are going and you can do that by building out these meaningful rituals at certain points so maybe our leads have a ritual doing a planning exercise to kick off at the start of each new half or quarter.
And so that’s the kind of overview of the recipe that we’re going to go through and this is going to help us think about how we might go about making more collaborative magic with our teams so what we’re going to do here is we’re going to break down each of these thinking about the mindsets the behaviors and the rituals that you’re.
Developing with your team and what I hope to do is give you ingredients that you can start to use with your own teams so I’m going to show you this of course I’m going to do this in fig jam and give you tips in fig Jam but I’m going to give you best practices that you can apply regardless of what tool you’re using to collaborate and communicate.
With your teams and so my goal is hopefully walk you all walking out of the session coming out of the session today is that you’ll have some tools in your tool belt that you can use in order to create more of these jams with your team I’m going to cover it quite a bit you don’t need to memorize it all there will.
Be no pop quiz except there is a quiz at the end but you don’t have to you don’t have to Ace it but I’m just hoping you walk out with something and this isn’t a silver bullet there’s no it’s not like you nail this once and you’re going to jam the rest of your life it is a constant work in progress so hopefully you can use these tools and refine it.
And develop your own craft of collaborative magic over time so with that we’re ready to dig in but Andrew are there any questions we should talk about before we start are we good to go and start about shaping mindsets we’re good to go let’s do it great digging in with shaping mindsets so this first piece again is.
The foundation of our collaborative sessions the foundation of our jam recipe and here the important part is to help people form those those relationships across the team so what are some things that you can do to start develop those mindsets so three things I’m going to share today is creating Mutual.
Understanding offering a surprising amount of transparency and then making your work amount more than just the work itself let’s start with creating our mutual understanding so all too often it can be the situation where you start a relationship you start somewhere with your team and there’s.
Different opinions about where you are and where you’re going now this can happen at an individual level we’re a manager and a direct report think they have different ideas about how they’re performing and where they want to go in their career it can be at A Team level where there’s different ideas about what projects you should work on and what are.
The goals of those projects what metrics should we be tracking or it can be what should we be working on at any given time and so it’s important to overcome this by developing a mindset of mutual understanding so that everyone is on the same page about where you are at the given moment and where you’re going as a team as an individual as a company as a.
Collective and the tool to do this is to start to create shared expectations and you need to do this at every level of your organization for every relationship that exists across your team it’s important to have those shared expectations so that goes at the teammate level with each manager in your direct report at the project level for.
Everyone to be on the same page and you’re for every meeting for every time that you’re getting together with a group of people for example for this talk we want to have shared expectations about why we’re all here and what we’re hoping to get out of the session today I’m excited to announce that we have a manager’s toolkit that can help.
You start to have some of these conversations so if you go to figma.com community and search for the manager’s toolkit this is a publicly available template now and it has tools for you to do that to start to have these conversations with your team document them and just make sure everyone’s aligned about what you’re all doing.
Together and how you want to build your relationship over time so there’s tools like development discussions project planner tools and meeting tools that you can use to start to create some of this Mutual understanding with your teams so that’s our first ingredient then we want to start to think about offering surprising transparency I can’t.
Tell you how many organizations I’ve worked at where there are cross-functional silos and none of the teams are talking to each other and it creates all kinds of tension between teams and anyone else experience that kind of situation where their silos amongst yeah absolutely happens all the time and it makes us sad as Michael’s.
Bringing on our teardrop here yeah and it also creates a lot of inefficiencies a lot of missed opportunities to create this point of connection on your team and so you can overcome this by starting to offer a more surprising amount of transparency so that you can uncover those opportunities to collaborate to get to know one another a lot of.
Duplicated work where you and another teammate across the company are working on the exact same thing I can’t tell you how many times that’s happened and it’s so frustrating not to mention the valuable feedback that teammates might have in other teams that can help you improve and take your work to the next level.
And so the tool to do this is to create transparent process and communication so as a as a leader as a manager as an individual on the team it’s important to think about communicating your workout to the group so everyone knows is aware of what’s going on making sure as you set those expectations everyone’s aware of those expectations and has an.
Understanding of how things are progressing in your work you also want to do this with processes so if you establish a great weekly team meeting process with your team you should encourage other teams to be able to use that by sharing the process that you use sharing those wins those successes so other people can build off.
Of that and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time in fig Jam there’s a great tool that we just released recently called custom templates that allow you to create those processes things that you’re doing together in fig jam and then share those with other teams so they can also use those and don’t again have to recreate.
That every time I’m going to show you custom templates now I’d love to understand so we just talked about setting expectations there’s a lot of great tools you can use that I just showed you for expectations I’m going to create a custom template for one of those let’s get stamps or any reactions on which of these we should create do we.
Want to create a template for teammate expectations project expectations or meeting expectations okay I’m getting plus ones for meeting expectations from Michael thank you oh we I don’t know project exploitation okay meaning expectations it is okay great so I’m going to show you now if I want to create better meeting expectations uh in.
With my team maybe I want everybody to be able to use the agenda template that I’ve created so every meeting they have they can have an agenda with their team so I’m gonna go back to that toolkit that I just showed you again this is in the community I have all these meeting expectation tools here let’s say that I simply want to create a template of this.
Introduction format so that anyone who’s running a meeting can easily pull this into their meeting they can run a simple introduction with their team and not have to think about creating that in their boards so all I need to do is I’m going to copy this element so I’ve just right clicked it I have it here I can copy it by.
Right-clicking I use Ctrl C or sorry command C then I’m going to bring this into the file that I have here it’s just a blank file I’m going to go ahead and paste that so now I have that here great that’s all I need I got the content I want to share maybe I customize it to our brand colors I can go ahead and change the color maybe I really like.
Green I want this to be green I can make it exactly what’s fitting for our organization maybe we have larger meetings I add more cards I get take away some cards because we mostly have a smaller team I can really just customize it to be exactly what I want we also have a question here on our poll what’s your feelings by today I like that so.
I’ll leave it but I can just go about customizing this template exactly the way that works for our particular team I’ll also go ahead and name this let’s just say call it introduction cards and now I’m going to create a custom template to do that I go up to the share button in the top right corner here go over to the publish Tab and then I.
Publish this as a template if you have something that the whole world can benefit from you can always publish it as a community file and share that with the big bear Community as well but I’m in this instance I’ve customized that to our brand colors maybe I didn’t but you could um so I’m going to share it just to our.
Organization so I go ahead and click publish here then I can name it I can add a description let people know a little bit more about how to use this what it’s for that type of thing and then I get to decide do I want to publish this to the entire organization or just to the team that this particular resource is in right now I think.
Everyone should use this at twig random prizes so I’m going to go ahead and leave it the whole organization go ahead and click publish and that’s it now we have this resource that can start other teams can start using they can start setting those expectations at the share their meetings kick off better meetings of their team and we’ve created some.
Transparency so the thing that’s worked really well on our design Advocates team can now start working well on the sales team and the product team and other teams can start to benefit from those those operations so that is custom templates and you start using that today yeah you’ve got a great question love it great question.
About how to approach Mutual understanding on a global team where people are coming from very different perspectives what what would you say how would you go about taking that one it’s a great question and something that’s relevant to so many teams out there especially now that we’re enabling remote work and.
Folks can work from anywhere and something to think about with your teams the first thing I would recommend well I think I think the most important thing I would recommend is really just starting those conversations opening up the conversations both at a one-on-one level with the folks on your team to get to know them understand their perspectives.
Their their cultures everything that might be important that goes into the way that they like to work and then also to bring that at a team level also as you’re thinking about running meetings with folks in a remote environment it’s important to think about the the experience of all the teammates on in in the particular collaboration so if you.
Have a meeting where some folks are in person and some are remote be cognizant of things like where the camera is situated make sure you’re talking to them make space for everyone in the conversation so don’t let the people in the room kind of take over a conversation make sure you’re making space for people that might be remote.
Like we have our folks in our board here today want to bring them into the conversation so that it really feels like a collective and not kind of one group versus another any other ideas you might share Andrew I think we’re going to talk a little bit more later about alignment scales and other techniques to sort of create these kinds of behaviors.
Where you start to understand where there might be misalignment and kind of make it open for people of different kinds of participatory I don’t know perspectives to jump in so we’ll we’ll go we’ll go through some behaviors and some rituals as well yes absolutely we’ll get to intentional spaces which I think will be great for that in just a.
Minute a great question thanks whoever some into that for for bringing that in here I’m going to move on to our third and final mindset so these are kind of the foundational elements here and the third one to think about and one of my favorites is making work about more than work so when I first started out as a program manager we’re still working in.
An office but I was the only one in that role and I kind of felt like I was on an island I didn’t have anyone to kind of Riff Off of to fill in for me to kind of vent about things that were going wrong and in today’s remote environment as Andrew was mentioning it’s a lot different now and it can feel easy to get isolated when you’re sitting behind.
A computer all day and so I would encourage you to start to build more connection with your team in order to build those bridges I’m not sure if anyone had a chance to go to Andrew Schmidt’s talk yesterday the dying days of delightful software it was fantastic definitely check out the recording but he argued that delightful software can.
Allow for the humanity to shine through and I want to Advocate to bring that into our work as well we should let the humanity shine through it helps everyone see feel seen feel valued and really feel like they belong to a part of a team and so the tool that you can use to do this is to start to make time for.
Connection celebration and fun with your teammates we have another toolkit for you if one wasn’t enough if you’ve got a favorite figma.com community and search for the team building toolkit this is another toolkit that we’re releasing here that has resources for you to do each of those so it has activities at the top for you to form connection to.
Celebrate and to have fun so for example create user manuals with your team a great exercise in order to understand how people like to communicate and how they like to collaborate with one another there’s celebrations where you can create cards for one another and some opportunities for you to have fun with your team on a regular basis.
And I actually have a surprise demo that Andrew doesn’t know about but I’m going to demonstrate one of the quick fun and easy ways that we do this here at figma in the stat pack that I’m going to show you two cards that we’ve created so maldine is one of our designer Advocates and Mal helped cover for me when I was out on maternity leave.
Recently having second daughter Ivy and she covered for me for that and she also has done a lot of work in getting Andrew and I ready for this talk so I wanted to create a quick thank you card for her so let me show you here we have a thank you card for math so we just got together had a bunch of our teammates that work with Mal whether it’s our product.
Manager from the pink GM team Mexico or we have our one of our DA’s Louisa Mallory or we have one of our our sales reps here Mikey saying now we appreciate your help with this demo you’ve taught me how to fish through your demo skills which is something Mal does every day she helps out the team she helps all of us.
And she’s just a fantastic person so now wherever you are not sure I think you’re here somewhere thank you thank you Mel and I’m going to share this card with Mal and it’s that easy to show recognition for your teammates celebrate them and bring that in using something like big Jam it’s very easy to create cards like.
This where you just have everyone add a sticky add some stickers add a photo and I also have one for Andrew so Andrew your teammates also think very highly of you and I appreciate you helping me prepare for this talk so create a card for you as well so thank you yes Michael’s awesome uh just calling on a few in the words of.
A few of our teammates Michael Amadeo said the man the myth the legend which very aptly describes Michael and I have to read this quote from Emma because it’s too good she said Andrew thank you for being the ultimate believer and thought partner you always come with a pragmatic approach to every problem and listen to our collaborators.
I asked good people and Andrew is good people let’s give a round of applause to Andrew yeah so I’m going to share this card with Andrew and again this is just a little bit of the way that you can make work about more than the work recognize the humanity in people and bring that into.
Your collaborations into your time with one another and that can help you get to know one another and also just create that sense of belonging and fun for your teammates so it’s not just about the work itself and yes Julian I think he is blushing but it may also be the flash that they put on him hahaha.
They did true story they put that yeah anyway so and just are the three mindsets and again those form the foundation of creating this recipe that can help you jam more often with your teammates so those are creating your Mutual understanding by setting expectations creating a.
Surprising amount of transparency by creating these processes and these communications that go up and down across the organization and finally making work about more than the work by getting to know your teammates and making space for those times for connection celebration and fun what questions do we have now Andrew.
Sorry I was plus wanting the questions that you can submit there um so the the other big question and uh you know I think we field something like this a lot what if you work at a place that uh maybe isn’t okay with teasing people for you know maybe this or that or the man the myth the legend making cards doesn’t feel like something that’s normal or is.
Expected what if you’re at a place like that so what do you what do you recommend there yeah it’s a great question and I do want to recognize that not Everyone likes to play games during work not Everyone likes to get silly and with their teammates and that’s completely okay but everyone does like to feel valued and feel like they belong.
And feel heard and seen in their organization and on their teams and so that’s why I started with mutual understanding because the first thing that I do recommend is setting that expectation of how you like to communicate how you like to be recognized and having those conversations not just with your manager.
But also with your peers ask them how they like to be seen how they want to communicate with you how they want to be brought into conversations that you have together and then also we’ll talk in a minute about intentional spaces but creating those inclusive environments where everyone can come to the conversation in the way that that feels.
Appropriate to them and also I would recommend that this this takes time it’s not going to happen overnight you can’t just have one conversation with some wouldn’t expect to be best friends and make them feel valued and have them have fun in your conversations just work on it over time work on building authentic connections with your teammates and then.
Over time hopefully you can understand what they like and bring some more of that kind of fun and silliness into the conversations Andrew anything else you might add uh I like birthday cards as sort of an entry point everybody likes to get a birthday card everybody likes to you know celebrate other people so if you.
Think you can get away with a birthday card try that one first yes everyone has birthdays and everyone might not want to have a big party where they’re put up in front of everyone but when you make it a car that you can just send someone they can celebrate in the comfort of their own their own home if they want great so with that uh we will move on we can.
Bring up any other questions about mindsets at the end if you have a burning question you want to get to with that let’s move on to behaviors so once you’ve established this foundational level of the mindsets with your team then you want to start to think about what are the behaviors that you can encourage on a regular basis in order to.
Reinforce those mindsets that you’ve established and here I want to I want you to think about breaking the mold or the way that you do things today and start to think outside the box and the three things I’m going to talk about are creating intentional spaces sharing before you’re ready and then showing up and engaging with your team.
Start with intentional spaces and we’ve talked about this a little bit already but a key thing to know here is that people are going to disengage when they are bored uncomfortable or they don’t care so if you’re shaping the mindsets in your team and understanding what they care about and creating the sense of.
Belonging hopefully you’ve combated that one you have people that care that are invested in what you’re doing so now you need to start thinking about how do we keep people interested how do I make them comfortable to engage and collaborate with it with one another in the spaces that we have the other thing that I want to mention here Builds on.
Rye reads talk yesterday so I’m not sure if you saw this he they gave a great talk about um uh content design yesterday and they were talking about how their Mentor gave them feedback about how a doc might not be the most effective way to communicate things because they were sending out these incredible docs and they were very.
Thoughtful intentional I had all the right words in there but they were just getting crickets no one was responding to them and I don’t know if you all have experience but I’ve gone into meetings where I think I have a great presentation and you know you ask questions you ask to have activities and no one does anything and you just get.
Crickets it’s painful so I want to encourage you to think outside the box where I talked about how they decided to make things more Visual and that brought in their collaborators brought in that feedback that they needed so for your meetings I would encourage you to do the same thing I see our poll is being filled out here which.
People use for meetings I think this is a biased sample because we have a lot of people using big jam it looks like but Doc’s also for meetings of course are very popular never going back glad to hear that because the tip here is to start getting people out of that board mindset through static things like docs and slides and bring people into spaces.
That are more visual more interactive and more inclusive to get your group engaged now for things like uh the the content that rye was talking about they ended up kind of putting together a quick prototype and sending that out in a more visual format that’s a great way to get people responding to things get people.
Engaged give people a vision for what you’re talking about and we are hosting a meeting I want to encourage you to start thinking outside of docs and slides which are more static and start thinking about ways that you can bring your team bring your teammates your collaborators into the conversation I am of course biased but I think fig.
Jam is a fantastic tool to do this in every meeting There’s an opportunity to do this but there’s also things that you can do to create those intentional spaces even within a tool like fake Jam so the first thing is setting colors you can create colors just to make things again more visual more inviting and reflect your own unique style so for any.
Element you have here in big Jam you can click on it and you can change the color here we also have custom colors so if I want to make this the color of our stickies here I can do that you can bring in your brand colors for example again adding stickers is a fun way I’ve seen we’ve seen lots of stickers that are wonderful Jammers are bringing in.
Here but stickers you can find down here on the toolbar and you can find stickers for all kinds of things so if you want to bring in a Star Sticker which is what I just had there you can search for that and bring that on the board here lots of stickers being added and again it just adds a little bit of fun a little bit of visual elements to your your boards or.
Your collaborations and then face stamps are a great way to bring in and attribute things to your teammates recognize them for their work and also just call out people and you can bring those face tabs into of the board here and then you can also change those face stamps you can do that with the the stamp wheel if you use your keyboard.
Shortcut e and then bring in your ocean face stamp and then you can change that to any anyone else on your team so if I wanted to change this to Andrew just to bring him in if he’s not here already we have him right here so those are a few tools that you can use to kind of set the stage on the boards and jams that you’re doing and then a few other.
Tools that you can use in your collaborations to keep your group kind of navigating with you sections are a great way to kind of navigate the conversation and you can create links to certain sections by copying those you can also group certain elements and you can do things like showing and hiding if you want certain elements to kind of.
Remain hidden for a while or lock certain things you can do that there the timer is a great tool up in the top left bar here just to set a certain amount of time for activities you might be doing and then you can also of course set some set some tunes on to provide some background music Ambiance for your conversations and then the most.
Important thing that I think you can do to create those intentional spaces back to Andrew’s question earlier or one of your questions earlier about the remote team is interactivity creating ways for your group to interact in different capacities so maybe it’s putting stickies on the board maybe it’s reacting to things with stamps there’s.
Also a ton of widgets that can bring in this interactivity we’ve seen the photo booth widget a few times but this is the alignment scale that Andrew was mentioning earlier it’s a great way just to get a pulse check a temperature check from folks in the room without providing too much pressure on them so if you have someone that’s a little more introverted.
Or doesn’t like to speak up as much an alignment scale is a great option to create spaces for them to still provide input without putting too much pressure on them so we can see how interactive our meetings are today and then we can always reveal our results and we have let’s see Dustin is feeling like his meetings are a little less interactive.
So maybe I might pull dust into that conversation and ask him for a little bit more context so that was a lot of tools phew but hopefully they can help you create some more intentional spaces and start to think about for every meeting you have think about is there maybe something more I can do to create this space in a.
More engaging way make it more inclusive for the folks that I’m going to have in the room and make it just a little bit more collaborative and break out of that discussion of just having a Docker slides for that particular meaning so start to think about what you can do there the next tool here is sharing before.
You’re ready and so I don’t know about you but I sometimes get a little bit hesitant when I am working on something I’m heads down for example on these slides I was really hesitant to share my early ideas with Mal and Andrew I was like I don’t know if they’re going to think they’re good enough I’m not sure this is polished.
They’re going to judge me if I send these they’re going to say okay I need no talk for you so I was you know a little scared I didn’t want to share it but you know overcame that fear and I would encourage you to instead of waiting until something feels perfect Sharon it’s oh there we go fly over Live Die Mooring here we go.
Um share it before you’re ready uh get people in the habit of starting to share things and get that feedback more more often and earlier in the process so that you can get the feedback when you can still do something about it if I had to waited to put this whole presentation together and share it with Mal at the very end.
It could be a disaster if she was like I’m not sure this is going to work and we’d have to go rework it waste a ton of time for everyone in the process so instead I’d encourage you to start sharing things more early and often with your teens especially in the context of today’s work in progress world as Andrew mentioned.
And a few tools you can use to do this we talked about sections you can link out to any section by right-clicking and copying that link that way if I want to focus Andrew’s attention just on this particular slide I can say I’m not ready for feedback and everything but I love your thoughts on this particular slide send that right to him and you can also.
Use commenting to get feedback on a particular area so I could say Andrew how’s it going I can start with app mentioning to at mention a particular person so I have a lot of folks in this file but I just want Andrew’s thoughts on this I can say Andrew how’s it going and that way we can bring him into the conversation.
So these are just a few tools you can use to share things before you’re ready but I would encourage you to regardless of what tool you’re working in share your thoughts share your Concepts share your jams earlier and more often with your team to get that feedback that you need and then the last behavior that I would regularly encourage is.
Uh showing up and engaging now this one may be the one that I think is most important in today’s world because as I mentioned as a facilitator it can be really painful and scary to get up in front of a room to get in front of a zoom and ask questions feel like you have great content to share and then no one responds no one engages and you get.
The sense that everyone’s kind of tuned out I imagine some of you are even tuned out right now and that’s okay no judgment because I understand it can be comfortable just to stay on your phone stay zoned out get that endorphin rush of pulling up Instagram or some other app and it can be scary to be that first person to engage when someone asks you.
To do something because again you don’t want other people to judge you or you’re not sure your ideas are quote unquote good enough so I would encourage each of you to start to be the change here for every meeting that you attend for every collaboration that you’re with in your teammates be brave enough to be that first person to engage be bold enough to.
Stay present what if you didn’t zone out for any of your meetings crazy I know maybe start just with the rest of this talks stay engaged put down your phone put it in your pocket it’d be okay and try to do that in the time just to be a little bit more intentional and show respect to the other people in the room the facilitator the other people that.
You’re engaging with in real life so you can start to get the most out of those collaborations make the most of the time that you all have together and so a few tools you can use to do this you’ve seen this already a lot today but in fig Jam you can use emotes so if you use the keyboard shortcut e that brings up the emote wheel here and.
You can use emotes to just let people know how you’re reacting to things we use this all the time in meetings and really just gives a little bit of life to the meeting and lets people know kind of where you’re at and how you’re feeling about it stamps are also a more kind of uh trans or permanent way to show that recognition on the board.
Itself by just stamping what you’re feeling I see Will saying go Katie that C helps out a lot I know that things are going well here and I see all kinds of high fives coming up which is awesome because I know the team’s having fun which is great and then we haven’t talked about cursor chat but that’s what Patrick’s doing now you can use that.
Backslash shortcut and say whatever you want so I can say this is fire we get a fun reaction there thank you all and again you can just see that this makes a big difference in me understanding what you all are thinking get some feedback get some input from my group and we’re going to demo this now we’ve been demoing this throughout but we will just.
Have over and let us know how are you feeling today so is it how are you feeling about this talk how are you feeling today at config how are you feeling in life give us a stamp a sticker let us know and I always love this Jam sticker that is my go-to Mal’s got the surfing dog so things are going well in Mal’s day and that’s fantastic.
So you can just see this is another a great way just to make your meetings a little bit more interactive get your group engaged and again stay present with your group folks are stoked that’s awesome I’m getting a plus as a as a diligent student I appreciate that someone is excited someone wants a jam loving it great.
And that is a quick recap of our behaviors so again these are building on the mindsets that we’ve established as our foundation and these are the daily behaviors you can bring into the collaborations with your teammates by creating those intentional spaces sharing before you’re ready and showing up and engaging with your group Andrew.
Back over to you what do we want to talk about now so the big question that people have is what do you do if your group won’t engage you know let’s imagine we’ve got these seven eight people in the file no one wants to put a sticky on anything especially not the first sticky first sticky is the toughest uh what do you what do you do.
It’s a great question and one that I I deal with all the time I would say a couple things the first is be comfortable being awkward I am awkward all the time and I’m okay with it you know I was a little bit nervous about it first I’ve come to accept it you know and sometimes it’s going to be awkward sit with silence people don’t.
Like silence but I have come you know I do these workshops uh weekly demos about fig jam and there are times where I’ll just like sit for 30 seconds waiting for that first person to put the stamp and you know I get comfortable with it um so I would say just you know put yourself out there be a little bit vulnerable be a little bit comfortable.
With some awkward silence but then the other thing I would really recommend is making it as easy as possible to do that first thing so that’s why I love things like the alignment scale or having placeholder stickies or those intro cards that I showed you those are great ways where it’s just a one-click option for people to engage so it reduces the.
Pressure reduces that entry point and as soon as they do that first thing then they might be more likely to do another thing and another thing and as you see the momentum build those other people coming in it becomes easier and easier for every other person to start to interact with what’s going on anything you might add.
So I I certainly think that it makes you really have to design the experience and then also be willing to sit with pauses and silence and other things like that and then even maybe point out that someone maybe hasn’t added anything in a little bit or that there’s you know an empty row or something like that yeah so the other big question I want to address.
I think many of us work in an environment where there might be you know 30 people in one room or 50 people in one room and you know multiple 5 10 15 20 maybe even 100 150 people distributed yeah so how do you manage sort of a group that’s split like that yeah uh through you know using some of these tools absolutely it’s another.
Great reason why I love fig Jam because big Jam allows it makes it more inclusive and when you’re kind of in person it’s the people in the room people at the table the people that are the loudest and most extroverted and willing to voice their opinion that often get the most airspace but by having a tool like fig Jam you provide.
Those spaces where other people can come into the conversation provide that input and you can hear those voices and bring in ideas that may not have been voiced and may have you know never been never been brought into the conversation before so a tool like fig Jam can really open up a lot of possibility there and then also being intentional about how.
You’re designing that so creating activities where you’re getting the input that you need for your specific goals of that particular collaboration so thinking about how you’re going to design that activity to get everyone engage and get the input that you need anything else you might add I think one of the other big things to think about.
Is how to split up the time that you have with that group you know you potentially might want to have a session that is uh you know more of a standard presentation and then also have a portion of the session where people maybe pull their computers out and start voting Emoji reactions you know something like that depending on the.
Makeup of the group but splitting it out and thinking really intentionally such a great point and another reason why an agenda is so important so we have that inner managers toolkit recommend having that at the beginning but I’m also realizing that we are getting low on time I tend to ramble so we’re going to keep going and talk very quickly.
About rituals um so rituals are what help you provide that intentional constraint that allows the team to focus a little bit more as you’re building on these behaviors and shaping these mindsets and here at figma we think a lot about the product development process of brainstorm design and build and there are very great.
Rituals that happen to each of these steps brainstorms design crits bug bashes but we know this is a collaborative process and today’s work in progress World we’re constantly iterating and collaborating and this goes around and around and so today I quickly I want to touch on three higher level rituals that you can use for any.
Collaboration that you’re doing start strong Beginnings making time to reflect and then making meaning starting with strong Beginnings so if you don’t have contacts and you get dropped into something it can create a lot of thrash so this could be getting dropped into a job getting dropped in the middle of a project or having a.
Meeting where you just start talking and no one sets the context of why are you there and what are you trying to discuss so I encourage you for every beginning of every relationship whether it’s the start of a new uh when you start a new job you bring it on new teammates sort of a project or the start of a meeting give your teammates the right.
Introductions guidelines and contacts that they need to thrive in that particular collaboration some tools you can use to do this at the start of things like meetings having an opportunity to have icebreakers and this doesn’t need to be your cheesy icebreakers it could be as simple as just letting everyone introduce.
Themselves and let them know their name and their role for example giving people space to understand who’s all together then doing what we were just talking about of starting your agenda so tables are a great way to do that in fig jam and you can access tables here add those great way to provide some structure and then adding context with things like.
Graphs so that’s a way that you can start strong beginnings and that’s a ritual I recommend thinking about at the start of any new collaboration that you’re doing with your team at the other end of the spectrum making time to reflect it can be really tempting to move from one thing to the next but I encourage you instead to make.
Time to think reflect and celebrate gather the learnings so that you can then build on what you’re doing from one thing to the next and this goes from anything from a project to project or from meeting to meeting it can be tempting to have those back to back but instead make some space for yourself and so here are the tools you can use are.
Things like the alignment scale again to get a temperature check of how you did there is a quiz I promised a quiz so we have a quiz here there’s a great quiz widget that you can use in order to check for understanding with your team people ask people what’s important for jamming and then you can let me know how you’re feeling about this and again data.
To let people know the results of what you did and how you perform together so those are the tools for reflection and then our last our last ritual here is making meaning and I can’t tell you my flyover’s here I can’t tell you how many kind of ideas die on Post-its so here I encourage you to make time to synthesize and bring the it ideas and opportunities.
Out of your brainstorms and so here are the tools you can use are things like voting I’m going to start a quick vote for our group to vote on the mindsets rituals and behaviors that we talked about voting you can access in the top left corner here we’ll start that boat and hopefully end it before we end here and then there’s Integrations that you.
Can use like jira linear and Asana to turn your ideas into action at the end uh so we have about here which of these resonated the most our mindsets our behaviors or our rituals let us know I’m always a fan of the mindset so I’ll vote for that one and I see some votes coming in here while we’re doing that we’re going to.
Quickly wrap up uh those were our rituals I went over them very fast but again for any collaboration that you’re doing I recommend thinking about the rituals that you have for the beginning making space at the end to reflect and then making meaning over time and to quickly recap so we talked about these ingredients again I’m not.
Expecting that you’ll memorize all of these I’m really hoping you walk out of here with these tools that you can then use to go from working just working to jamming more often with your team and we recommend doing all of this in big Jam of course it’s a great tool to collaborate with your team I also introduced our manager’s toolkit and our.
Team building toolkit wanted to give a shout out to two other tools that we have here the doodle library is a resource on the community by ADI Ben Hur and that is something that I use to create the illustrations for this presentation I’d recommend you try using that as well and then the flyover widget by Emin is a great resource created that.
I use to show the presentation and go from one side to the next and at the end of the day the question becomes are you just working or are you jamming and if you’re just working I encourage you to start thinking about the mindsets behaviors and rituals on your team so you can start jamming more often with that let’s make collaborative.
Magic Let’s Jam thank you all for coming foreign
Speakers: Andrew Hogan – Insights, Figma Kaitie Chambers – FigJam Advocate, Figma Join us for an in-depth session aimed at …
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