Design Routines at Buzzvil
Design at Buzzvil does not live in a single squad, mission, or product.
We operate as a functional design team, working behind multiple front-mission teams. Each designer is embedded in product work, owning features, flows, and outcomes for different customers and business goals. At the same time, we are expected to grow as a coherent design function: aligned in quality, direction, and craft.
To make it work, we rely less on hierarchy or heavy process, and more on a small set of routines. These routines create alignment without slowing teams down, and autonomy without designers drifting apart.
Below is a look at the core design routines that keep us moving in the same direction.
Why routines matter in a functional team
When designers are distributed across products:
- Context fragments quickly
- Decisions become local
- Quality standards can drift
Routines are how we counterbalance that.
Not through constant reviews or approvals, but through regular moments of reflection, sharing, and recalibration. Most of these routines are lightweight, but deliberately prepared. They exist to compound learning over time.
Biweekly design sync-up
Every two weeks, the design team comes together for a sync.
This is not a status meeting.
The goal is to share what we learned, not just what we shipped.
Typical topics include:
- What we released in the last sprint
- What KPIs or signals define success for those releases
- What surprised us after launch or testing
- Trade-offs we made and why
We also leave room for more informal topics:
- A tool or workflow experiment
- A design problem someone is stuck on
- A peer review for a critical release
- A discussion on methods or process friction
These meetings are prepared. Designers come in with something concrete to share, even if it is a small insight. Over time, this builds a shared understanding of how design decisions connect to outcomes across very different products.
Biweekly 1 on 1s
Every designer has a biweekly 1 on 1 with me.
This time is protected.
It is not about reporting progress. It is about depth.
We typically use it to:
- Unblock difficult problems
- Talk through complex design decisions
- Zoom out on ownership and scope
- Discuss collaboration issues or role boundaries
- Reflect on personal growth and judgment
These meetings are also prepared. Coming in with a clear topic allows us to go deeper, faster. Over time, this creates trust and psychological safety, which is essential when designers are expected to make high-impact decisions autonomously.
Monthly lunch study
Once a month, we gather for a lunch study.
The format is intentionally loose. We eat together and explore something new:
- A new design or prototyping tool
- An emerging technology
- A method or framework worth pressure-testing
Not every session is serious.
Sometimes we study a board game instead. Learning the rules, playing together, and laughing over bad strategies turns out to be surprisingly effective for team bonding and collaboration. The point is shared exploration, not output.
Quarterly design week
Design week is our heaviest ritual, and the one we protect the most.
Over the years, its shape has evolved, and its intensity has fluctuated. Still, we keep it because it secures something rare: time to work on the design function itself.
During design week, we might:
- Run workshops on design principles or interaction patterns
- Revisit our design token structure
- Align on system-level decisions that are hard to tackle sprint by sprint
We also deliberately step outside:
- Attend a design conference
- Visit an exhibition
- Invite external speakers
- Prepare and give our own internal talks
Design week is about recharging perspective and raising the ceiling of the team, not shipping features.
Autonomy, with alignment
Buzzvil’s design routines are not about control.
They exist to support a team where designers:
- Own real product decisions
- Work across very different contexts
- Are trusted to exercise judgment
Routines give us shared language, shared standards, and shared momentum, while preserving the autonomy required to move fast inside product teams.
As Buzzvil grows, these routines will keep evolving. What matters is not the exact format, but the intent behind them: making space for learning, alignment, and craft in a system designed for execution.