4 ways to elevate craft on your team

“Sweating the details” is literally a company value at Plaid.

So I asked their Head of Design Christophe Tauziet to pull back the curtain and show us exactly what that looks like in practice. Here are a few snippets that I saved in my notes 👇

1 — “Design Jams”

There’s an unspoken social cost to asking for help. We know people are willing but it’s still hard to say “I’m stuck can you help?” especially early in a project.

That’s why Plaid has branded the idea of “Design Jams”.

At any moment a designer can drop a note in Slack and say “hey I’d love to have a design jam on _____”.

Giving it a name strips away the social cost and creates an expectation that designers collaborate very early in the process.

2 — Lots of Loom videos

Christophe talks a lot about the value of “exposing the process” and one core way that happens is through async Loom videos in Slack.

There are a lot of benefits that I’ve talked about before but one thing really stood out to me from our convo:

Exposing more of thinking through Loom increases the surface area for engineers to contribute. And the bigger role they play early in the process, the more pride they take in their work and the more likely they are to go above and beyond when implementing your design.

“We’re in the video generation now”
Christophe Tauziet

3 — Keeping CRIT fresh

Christophe shares a ton of advice for CRIT and giving feedback but one thing that really stood out to me was how he intentionally mixes up the format to keep the practice from growing stale.

Plaid uses three types of CRIT interchangeably:

1. Presentation with Q&A at the end

2. Silent CRIT live with Figma comments

3. No context CRIT (just show the work and people immediately start critiquing)

4 — “Polish reviews”

Plaid has a panel of ~4 super senior ICs who have a great eye for visual details and deeply understand the design system.

As a final step before production code is written, they have 24-48 hours to take a fine comb through the Figma file and nit-pick the sh*t out of the UI.

I would’ve paid to have this as a service at Maven 😅

There are another 5+ takeaways in my notes but this email is long and I’m about to go fill those blank artboards in Figma :)

I’m super pleased that this episode is the 100th ever because it’s as good as it gets.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇