Design Team onsites: In praise of the unnecessary details

Why yearbook polaroids, welcome-pack stickers, and a biscuit tin full of predictions are worth the effort

Note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not represent those of the company I work for.

I really don’t want to write about AI.

I don’t have a new workflow, or hot take, I’m not going to tell you how you should be working. What I do want to write about is something smaller, and maybe a little cheesier: I love my job. Especially the part of my job where I get to plan onsites for the Design team.

As the only DesignOps person in the company, I’m the one who ends up organising the onsite (together with da big boss Dr Talke Hoppmann-Walton).

We get to decide whether the agenda is just another doc or a mobile-friendly experience. Whether there are name tags, and whether the whole thing feels like a meeting, or something worth getting together for.

My first onsite was 2 months after I joined the company. The second one was just a week ago, and I want to share all the details we could’ve skipped, but for me were the parts I loved doing most.

📲 The mobile agenda that no one thought they needed

Both years we created a mobile-friendly agenda for the team to use on their phones before and during the onsite, which we put on the team Whatsapp group.

If everyone has their phone on them constantly anyway, there’s nowhere better for the agenda to live.

The agenda contains everything they need to know: the purpose of the onsite, what to pack, the timetable, who’s sleeping where, how to get to the venue, a shared folder for photos, and a Spotify playlist to set the mood.

Could the agenda be vibe coded? Sure it could. Would I enjoy doing that? Probably not. So, PDF it is.

🏅The award ceremony that made everyone slightly competitive

This year, we picked five categories for the design team awards.

Topics that are strategically important in our organisation: accessibility, cross-discipline alignment, research-based decisions, quality, and a special prize for the newest person on the team. The team voted for each other on Microsoft Forms.

I designed the certificates, went to the print shop, argued with myself over paper thickness for far longer than is reasonable. My manager (and her kids) were in charge of the gifts: a hipster notebook (manager) and a bag of candy (kids).

Cansu, our researcher, emceed the ceremony, with sound effects and all. It was exactly as silly as it needed to be.

🕰️ Rituals that put a nostalgic end to things

The first year, we did a yearbook activity: one polaroid photo of each team member, a big sheet of paper, color markers, washi tape, and stickers.

Everyone gathered together to create this piece and we laughed hard while creating the “most likely to” statements for each of us.

It’s now framed and hanging proudly in our Berlin office.

This year we did something different: a time capsule.

We filled an old danish biscuits tin with our 2027 design predictions, some polaroids, thank-you notes to each other, and a printout of the UI of the Wero app we’d all been a part of designing.

It’s sealed and hidden in my office now, and I’m already looking forward to opening it together at next year’s onsite.

🎨 A few more special mentions

There was also a lot more that didn’t get its own heading but formed a part of my planning time. Preparing the welcome packs (with specially designed stickers), designing conversation cards to break the ice, bringing games to play together, and all the logistics and catering to individual needs that, of course, is a big part of making everyone feel comfortable.

Why I keep doing this

I’ve now been a part of two Design onsites, and if we compared them, you’d see roughly the same recipe each time: dedicate time to it, make the onsite feel like a gift and not a chore, put physical objects in people’s hands, close with a ritual that points forward, and then get out of the way and let a house full of designers do whatever they need to do.

None of it is efficient. Not much of it would survive being pitched as an ROI line item. But, for what it’s worth, research on offsites does find real effects: teams that gather in person see measurably more collaboration afterwards, and even though the initial boost tends to fade within a few months, the connections you’ve made with each other don’t.

But honestly, I’m not writing this to justify the extra hours. I’m writing it because I got to design things, print them, cut them… and it made me as happy as it did the first time I did it for a living. I got to obsess over paper thickness and choosing a typography. Somewhere in there I remembered that this might be my favourite part of the job.

A big thanks to my manager Dr Talke Hoppmann-Walton for letting me go a little bit mental with it, both times.

And thanks to the team, for being worth all the unnecessary details. ❤️

Design Team onsites: In praise of the unnecessary details was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.