Visual 15:5s: A visual and fun way to share progress across teams
Every two weeks
Goal: Provide a summary of your team's accomplishments, work in progress, and opportunities that anyone in our organization can read in 5 minutes or less.
Visual 15:5 derives from a practice created by Yvon Chouinard, of Patagonia fame, and draws inspiration from Scrum's standup formats.
Getting a line of sight on work-in-progress for large teams can be challenging. At AppFolio, we tried several formats: Google Slides, Coda/Notion, and Trello. The implementation mostly looked the same: a description of what each designer completed in the last week and a visual artifact to help those who were unfamiliar.
We remixed Figma's weekly team update FigJam. Every two weeks, we open a copy of this template for each team to fill out. The board "closes" toward the end of the week, and the design manager is responsible for synthesizing updates and providing a summary, which goes to their manager. At the end of the week, a large FigJam with all of the week's updates is shared with the team, along with the written summary by the senior-most leader.
At the end of each quarter, we have the design leadership create a "UX Hall of Fame" to recognize and celebrate each designer's most impactful contributions.