Building Team Culture: Yeehaw
As Design Lead for the Rackspace Design System team, I created a bi-weekly meeting to celebrate our team members and team wins. I brought this practice with me to Funsize where we used it to help build project team bonds and buoy us through the challenges of agency life.
My Role: Lead UX Designer; Design Director
Collaborators: UX Manager, TPM, Engineering Lead, 2 UI Engineers, QE Engineer, 2 UX designers, Content Strategist, DevOps; Project Design Team.
The Need
Design Systems are hard. Our work is deep in the weeds of implementation details and cognitive quirks. We are architecting and codifying brand experiences and ensuring accessibility, usability and aesthetics. We are champions of consistency, and extensibility. We bridge the gap between numerous product teams fielding requests and educating our colleagues daily. Attention to detail is critical, speed is necessary, and collaboration is key. It’s wonderful and exciting and terrifically exhausting.
Six months into our work, the Helix team was seriously feeling the effects of the fast-paced, constant, attentive hustle. Frankly, we were all feeling burned out. As a fully remote team, the feelings of disorientation and disconnectedness were all the more potent. Every day, I logged on to our standup to a hollow-eyed brady-bunch in dire need of a beak. Something had to change.
Yeehaw
A celebration of us
I decided to schedule a Friday meeting that I called “Yeehaw”, which my team begrudgingly accepted. The goal of Yeehaw is to build community, social bonds, and team resilience. It’s a chance to celebrate our colleagues, to highlight team wins, to express gratitude, and to recharge each other.
Months later, a teammate confided that, when they received the meeting invite, they slacked another team member to get snarky: “Another design meeting? Ugh! The agenda just says, “Everyone share 1 yeehaw. WTF is a yeehaw?!“. To be fair I could have introduced it better. That was a major lesson learned.
Yeehaw has 3 rules:
Everyone must share one thing they’re proud of or thankful for.
No sharing work, giving feedback, strategizing, retro-ing, or complaining
After someone shares, we respond by saying “Yeehaw“
A typical yeehaw might be:
Yeehaw for Cathy building out a quick prototype of the drag and drop interaction. That collaboration helped us identify the right direction much faster!
or
Yeehaw for our 0.17 release! That was a ton of hard work and the release notes were both detailed and fun to read! Great job team!
Early Awkwardness
At first, Yeehaw was weird. We tried to coordinate our response “yeehaw”s, but it was awkward. We couldn’t seem to get the timing right (thanks zoomlag). Being so overtly positive was really uncomfortable, but it was also fun. And we ran into a really good problem: we all had to learn how to take a compliment.
Most team members were on board right away. However, one was quite recalcitrant. His contribution one week was, “I failed to make any progress this week, so there’s nothing to celebrate.” After some gentle prodding, we got an, “I guess…I woke up this morning. Yeehaw.“ If you try yeehaws, know that this is stellar progress!
Hitting our Stride
It took about a month to really find our comfort zone. We moved the meeting around, and cut it to a half-hour. It landed on Friday mornings in the middle of our two week sprint. Tuesday - Thursday were already full of reviews and scrum ceremonies. Friday mid-sprint was just the right time to buoy our spirits just when they started to flag.
Ceding ownership
After few months, what began as “Bart’s meeting” started to feel like OUR meeting. At some point I realized I had given up ownership of the meeting as my team took a shared ownership. It was a powerful moment when, so wrapped up in my work, I received a message from the whole team all at once requesting my presence at Yeehaw 🥰.
As the design system matured, our processes matured and our sprint cadence shifted. We added and removed stand-ups, syncs, reviews, demos, and retros. We shuffled attendance and agendas. The one meeting that always remained was Yeehaw. In one operational review meeting, it was the rest of the team that made Yeehaw on Friday morning a required meeting.
Reflection
Yeehaw is probably the single most important leadership decision I made on the Design System Team. It’s certainly my proudest contribution. We were a collaborative team and a learning team from the start. But over time, we became a nurturing team, a mindful team. What a tremendous honor to be a part of that community of practice, trust, and support. “Yeehaw.”