rebuy - raising design bar

At rebuy developers have something called tryday, it’s every other Friday they can spend the day on anything they want in order to learn, innovate or improve themselves. We as product designers wanted something similar and thus I created the Designer Day, once per quarter I bring the product design team together for creative challenges, sparking ideas that later fed into product work, and strengthening collaboration and culture.

I created Designer Day for two reasons. 1 to give designers space to experiment and strengthen creative thinking outside day-to-day delivery. 2 to improve our teambuilding and having fun together in what we do best. For each one I created a odd challenge like: design rebuy in a brand you like. Or use as much dark patterns on rebuy product detail page as you can.

There were two clear results that came of of the Designer Day that made them impactful.

First these results were always presented in a larger round to also product managers but often did not find a home in the product right away. Often these ideas were too out there or not aligned with the OKRs. But after some time a lot of these ideas / adaptations got into the product because the time was right or people got more used to the idea.

Second it really felt for product designers as a fun day to look forward to and enjoy together. It felt good to for product designers to let loose from existing constraints and limitations. It became a household collaborative fun day together where we challenge ourselves and have fun with design.

I helped 3 product designers by coaching them structurally so that they could promote. One into a mid level, one into senior and one into staff. Like most managers I had a skill matrix where it was clear what you need to be able to do. How I helped the product designers improve is by going through every skill one by one and explaining what I see that they currently miss. Then every 4 weeks in our 1:1 I would go through each one of those skills that need to be improved and asked what they did to become better. By doing this structurally I reminded them to work on it, got transparency on what they did and helped to observe the growth clearer.

The product designer I coached that became a staff product designer was also a strategic decision. He could really focus on pushing what a product designer at rebuy could do and disseminate that knowledge to the other product designers. Furthermore he influenced beyond his product department and disseminated knowledge to other departments at rebuy.