Editor’s note: Though many of us find ourselves working remotely for the first time, Greg Storey has been at it  for more than a decade, leading large, remote design teams at respected organizations like IBM, USAA, and Happy Cog.  Greg has loads of expert, actionable advice on how to increase creativity, collaboration and leadership when teams aren’t co-located.  The next two chapters are written from his unique point of view.

Productivity, agility, collaboration, innovation; none of these things are tied to a specific place. They are functions of people and teams. This is important to call out because at this time there are a historical number of companies and organizations being disrupted by the sudden requirement to change their place: from the office, lab, studio, etc. to the home.

Think about how many design job listings require a move to a city or region because the leadership can not conceive how to be productive, agile, and innovative unless members of the team are sitting, literally, right next to each other. Perhaps because they know of no other way, but most likely because of their pre-existing bias against distributed teams.

Rebecca Kerr, Principal Content Strategist at InVision, speaks to some best practices for collaborating with a remote team.

After my years of experience in leading remote teams (and otherwise), I can tell you that working remotely doesn’t have to be a disadvantage. Yes, it takes getting used to doing things in a different way. Some tasks take more time and consideration but distance does not have to impede on your team’s abilities to create and collaborate with others. Remember, outcomes come from people, not places! You and your team can be just as successful working remotely (perhaps more) if you reshape your team’s thinking, processes, and frameworks without having to lower expectations to  leadership.

As we know, what works for me and my team may not work for you. For that reason, the purpose of this chapter is to provide a set of different perspectives; consider it a set of revised ideas on how to run a successful distributed design team.

Communicate with reach and repetition

Communicating at work is often challenging and working remotely makes it harder. Without a plan for how your team will communicate internally and externally to the rest of the company, a remote team is always one Slack thread away from turning into Lord of the Flies. 

It doesn’t take much for the volume of messages in Slack (or Teams) and email to pile up. To top it off, most people don’t care enough to practice proper etiquette when communicating digitally.

My personal favorite is the three-foot-tall email-chain that’s been going on for weeks until you’re suddenly CC’d with zero context and only a “FYI” at the top. And yet you’re expected to digest the “conversation” and make a quick decision.

My next favorite: The impromptu question in Slack that generated a twenty-minute exchange of messages, emoji, and animated GIFs that you’re brought into with a simple @gregstorey followed by “scroll up.” Neither of these exchanges are positive or an effective way to communicate, but they’re done all the time.

It’s important to talk about communication needs and requirements as a team because you need to develop some empathy for what it’s like to be at the end of that sparkling trail of animated 90’s memes and weeping smiley faces.

Likewise, your team should have a communication strategy for how to communicate with your partners, your line-of-business, and the company-at-large. If you’re working for a large company it’s highly likely that a one-and-done strategy for communication will fail. Take a page from social marketing; map out what communication channels (the communication platforms available to you) you need to use to reach your audience successfully. And then determine what repetition (if any) you need to employ to get that message across to the most people.

In addition to these ideas, Jason Cyr, director of design transformation at Cisco, created a list of ways to improve remote communication that are worth considering. Here are a few suggestions from the list that I think are fundamental:

Facilitation is key

Every meeting, regardless whether it is remote or in person, should have someone appointed as the facilitator/chair/leader (not necessarily the organizer). This is one of the most important things you can do to ensure a successful meeting as they will be the person who makes sure all the other items below are  considered.

Act differently

Do you remember when you were a kid and you went to someone’s house for dinner? You knew that you were meant to act differently and be on your best behavior. The same idea applies here. Recognize that in a remote meeting situation you need to act differently than in an in-person setting. Help the facilitator, don’t dominate the conversation. And help make sure everyone is heard or invited to be heard.

Ensure a quality audio connection

In low-bandwidth situations ensure that you connect to the meeting audio with your cell phone or landline so that you always have a stable audio connection. Be diligent about muting if you are in a noisy location (seems obvious, but not always put into practice).

Turn your video on!

A lack of interpersonal chemistry and ease of multi-tasking are two things that kill remote meetings. Ensuring that everyone’s video is on and that you’re not checking email, Instagram, or ordering on Amazon helps to solve both.

RACI

The more people on the call, the harder it is to make it effective. Use the RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix as a way to evaluate who needs to be in the meeting versus who needs to be simply consulted beforehand and/or after.

Prepare, prepare, prepare

The organizer and the facilitator should put some extra effort into the planning. Test tools, dry run any activities, and create breakout groups ahead of time (if needed). Try to identify things that could fail and have a plan B in place.

Without successful communication your team is set up to fail. It’s right up there next to working electricity and Internet access in terms of necessities for a successful remote team. Invest the time to discuss this as a team and devise your communications plan. Don’t leave communication protocol up in the air.

Making creativity explicit

When co-located, key stages of the creative process emerge organically. This can be as simple as stopping someone in the cafeteria to show them a new user flow (testing), to jotting down an idea for a colleague on a piece of printing paper (ideation).

In a remote environment, all of these activities remain just as critical as they are in person. But achieving them requires being more deliberate about aligning, documenting, and communicating your process with others.

Stephen Gates, head design evangelist at InVision, describes this need as “putting structure” around creativity:

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Remote work shows you the flaws in your process and culture,” Gates says. “It can reveal a lot of your sins if you haven’t been doing the right thing. That’s why a lot of the more mature companies are able to do it more easily. They’ve spent the time to be more deliberate about how they work–for brainstorming, process, running a design critique, coming together as a team or working apart.  A lot of teams do this stuff mostly through happenstance, as opposed to saying, ‘This is the way we’re going to work.’ If you look at the hallmark of high maturity teams, they are much more deliberate about this.

Stephen Gates

InVision

Remote work shows you the flaws in your process and culture,” Gates says. “It can reveal a lot of your sins if you haven’t been doing the right thing. That’s why a lot of the more mature companies are able to do it more easily. They’ve spent the time to be more deliberate about how they work–for brainstorming, process, running a design critique, coming together as a team or working apart.  A lot of teams do this stuff mostly through happenstance, as opposed to saying, ‘This is the way we’re going to work.’ If you look at the hallmark of high maturity teams, they are much more deliberate about this.

Structure and creativity are not words you see used together often, but people—designers in particular—work best when a structure is put in place. And the “happenstance” that Stephen mentions? If left unchecked for too long in a remote setting you’ll learn a valuable lesson in what happens when you leave too much decision making to a designer. Manage your team’s process with intent, from start to finish.

Fostering creativity, building designers

To deliver dependable, successful design outcomes, leaders have to keep their teams curious, creative, collaborative, energetic, and always empathetic. It might take a bit of “plate spinning,” but you’ll end up with a productive team that delivers quality work. A primary responsibility of a design leader is to create an environment that fosters creativity and divergent thinking that takes physical and mental forms. Design teams often surround themselves with artifacts from all types of design: posters, desk accessories, LEGO, Funko figures, books, and furniture. They end up with a communal inspirational space that gets them into the right frame of mind in the morning and continues to inspire them throughout the day. Other “decor” comes in the form of artifacts of their work—from a journey map made of Post-It notes to nearly finished work printed on gigantic, nine-foot plotters. It’s not hard to be inspired in these spaces, but they are hard to replicate for a remote team. Even if you give everyone the same super motivational desktop image it doesn’t come close to having the same impact as being surrounded by physical things that inspire great work.

Without the typical surroundings of the design team space, fostering creativity remotely requires thoughtful planning and ideation. Thankfully our profession comes with a number of tools that we can use to create new experiences; we just need to turn that inward and come up with activities that work within the constraints of remote work. Here are a few ideas to start:

Make time for design: Like show-and-tell that we all used to do as kids, create dedicated time per week for everyone to share at least one thing pertaining to inspirational design (or even just cool things that they read, saw, or did recently). It could be anything from someone’s UI portfolio, a podcast, a new typeface, a TED Talk, or an article in the latest issue of Eye Magazine. Take turns introducing your inspirations, who is behind the work, and why it inspires you or why you think it’s cool. Stretch your designers to present these things as if it was their own work. This helps them develop the ability to observe and interpret the work of others, create their own perspective based on rationale, and reflect on the experience.

Eight-hour design sprint: How often do we get to put our own tools to use for things we’d like to see out in the world? Set aside a day to do a quick design sprint to create a new process or tool to help your team better collaborate with your partners or create a new service to support a different area of the business.The designers at Home Depot call this “one-day problem framing.”

Steal like Austin: Speaking of taking pages, let’s grab a whole handful from Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like an Artist. A core message of the book is on stealing from the artists and people who inspire you. However, instead of simply stealing their style, dig into that person’s history and find what inspired them. Learn how to blend your own sources of inspiration into the muse that powers your creativity.

Side note: Kleon’s book is the perfect selection to read and discuss as a team. It’s a quickread and each chapter provides not only inspiration but activities to complete and share with one another. Austin has two more books, Show Your Work! and Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad.

Weekly design challenges: Put aside 10 minutes at the start of your weekly team meeting for a quick design challenge. Have fun with it but find ways to incorporate different design thinking activities combined with new constraints to keep the challenge fresh.

As creativity comes in different forms, consider stepping outside of your existing design practice, company, and industry to look for new ideas. Examine how creativity has an impact on other industries; and then, take those learnings and build new exercises. The important thing is to prioritize creative exercises in your team’s activity. And if it should happen outside of your efforts, throw every ounce of support on it you can provide.

Ideating in a remote environment

I had the pleasure of working for a few years on the IBM Design team in Austin, Texas. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to watch The Loop, an InVision film on the design program at the heart of IBM’s design-lead transformation. It tells the story of the Herculean task given to a small team to change how IBM solves problems for its clients and creates new products and experiences that are firmly grounded in user-centered design principles. It’s a classic David and Goliath story, but more importantly, you’ll get an inside look at IBM’s Austin studio space that was custom designed to provide the best experience possible for design-driven activities.

There are four spaces: Blue, Red, Green, and Yellow; these  can also be split into sub-spaces: A, B, C, and D. Sixteen teams of up to six persons can work simultaneously in relative comfort. The entire space has a top-mounted track system designed to accommodate rolling whiteboards that are approximately four-feet wide and seven- feet tall. To a designer it’s a wonder of the modern world and I have yet to see another system like it. My oh my, if those whiteboards could talk. They would have thousands of stories about designers testing hypotheses, pivoting after user research pointed to a different need, and the insane amount of ideation generated to solve for that need. It was hard not to be creative in that space. Whether the space was set up for one or sixteen spaces, it felt “design-y” and it definitely helped people change how they went about working to create better user experiences.

And then one day you go from that amazing in-person experience to trying to do the same thing sitting behind a computer screen with an active webcam. As much as I’d love to make the online experience better, one of the most challenging activities in a remote environment is also the one that’s easiest at a place like IBM Design in Austin—ideation.

In a physical space, ideation is much more accessible. Everyone knows how to drag a marker across a whiteboard, or jot an idea down on a sticky note. And yet in a remote environment, this is usually where teams first stumble.

To successfully ideate remotely, it’s important to approach this as a “user experience” challenge.What is the purpose of ideation? It is to make sharing and communicating ideas as accessible, frictionless, and fast as possible. We use whiteboards  because everyone knows how to use them. Sticky notes work because they’re small and disposable, forcing us to limit what we jot down and making ideas easy to discard.

Yet digital collaboration software is often the opposite of accessible, fast, or frictionless. Most collaboration software is purpose built to solve complex technological and communication problems at scale. They’re full of distracting and intimidating features. And they optimize for orderly, organized information sharing.

Digital ideation tools should be the opposite. They should be simple, accessible, and allow for unstructured creative freedom. Fortunately, there are digital tools now available that seek to replicate the experience of whiteboarding including InVision’s own tool, Freehand.

Freehand was created to solve for the inclusivity and speed of in-person ideation sessions, allowing for real-time collaboration via a simple online canvas. Teams can sketch images, type out notes, and review designs together, just like they would on a whiteboard. The toolset is intentionally limited, making it easy for any person to contribute (no matter their role).

Sidenote about Freehand

The first time I saw Freehand was at InVision IRL 2018, an “in-real-life” internal company event where we all get together for a few days to break bread, have some fun, and prepare for the coming year. I was a design executive at USAA at the time and was there to tag along with my boss, Mariah Garrett, chief design officer at USAA. She was invited to sit on a client panel. After the panel was over, we sat through the next presentation given by the CTO. The entire presentation was conducted on this weird, sketchy digital whiteboard where other people contributed in real-time with drawings, commentary, and animated gifs. It was one of the coolest presentations to date and at the end of it, the CTO introduced Freehand to the rest of InVision. He provided a URL for everyone to use to log in and add to the board. As people logged in, you saw cursors of different colors fly across the screen and start creating. And that’s why I love this tool. Just like in a real-time space, people can jump in and start adding to the work.

Freehand by InVision allows you to collaborate in real-time with a digital whiteboard.

Here at InVision, Freehand has become our default for whiteboarding, brainstorming, sketching, wireframing, and other ideation activities. Everyone in the company—from product to data science, to marketing to HR—uses it. It’s the core tool in everyone’s quiver because it mimics the whiteboard so well.

Your mileage may vary, but the important note here is to find a space or your team to ideate quickly and often. With all of that fostering of creativity, you’re going to need to find a way for your designers to use it.

Performing design critiques remotely

After many years in business, InVision product teams are still evolving our methods for weekly design critiques. While getting used to doing these things remotely may take some time, there are a few positive outcomes. At InVision, each design team gets one hour a week for critique. Time is divided equally depending on the number of projects that are flagged as needing review for the week. Critique sessions are facilitated by the design lead of each team and partners in product management and engineering are invited and encouraged to participate. All of the work to be reviewed is placed in a Freehand (read Ideating in a remote environment earlier in this chapter) along with a uniform outline the designer uses to provide constraints for feedback:

• What I am sharing today: (please include the actual problem you are seeking to solve with this work)
• The work is at the stage of: (e.g., discovery)
• The constraints I am dealing with are: (e.g., I only have two weeks, we don’t have x data available, etc.)
• I am looking for the following feedback: (be as detailed as necessary)

During the critique, participants are encouraged to focus on providing feedback and asking questions. We have tried more formal frameworks in the past, but they ended up taking longer without improving the quality of the sessions and didn’t justify the additional time. InVision designers prefer to use Freehand to present their work because if a new idea comes to mind, the team can quickly jump in and work on it in realtime. Having been a part of critiques in the past I can tell you that being able to quickly sketch out ideas in the same space as the work being reviewed is truly valuable for team ideation.

Everyone attending the critique is required to have their cameras turned on at all times. This helps to show that people are engaged, but more importantly it conveys the tone of the feedback and provides a sense of shared vulnerability. Providing feedback through voice alone comes off as absent of empathy. And I’m going to show my age here, but what are we—Charlie’s Angels?

Now it gets better. Sessions are recorded and shared out afterwards which lets the designer focus more on interaction with the people providing feedback and ideas during the session (rather than trying to document everything). If there is one aspect about working remotely that’s super positive, it’s that right there: the ability to focus on interacting rather than trying to transcribe in real time.

Note: The design teams tried using a dedicated note taker in the past but reviewing the video leaves nothing up for interpretation.

Other considerations:

• The leader should set the tone for the session when they log in. Focus on making the interaction productive and fun during the review. This event is super important to design team culture. The key is to provide enough process, but not to the point of rigidity.
• It’s easy to be less personable when you have a screen and camera in your face. Lead with empathy: How are the people presenting feeling? Be personable and positive. Be a reminder that you’re all there to critique the work, not the person.
• For a team working remotely for the first time it will take a bit of trial and error to find the right virtual experience. It’s important to remember that what works for us at InVision may not be the right fit for you. Charge your team with exploring new ways to host a better critique and have fun with it.

Ensuring visibility of the work

It’s often easy to know when you’re near a team of designers because the walls are typically covered with their work, everything from hundreds of sticky notes to print-outs of nearly finished designs of an application flow. These are the artifacts that business folks tend to gravitate towards because it provides evidence of their money being well spent. It’s vital that when switching to a remote environment your team doesn’t lose this visibility. The last thing you need is to suffer from you and your team being out of sight and out of mind. Without the walls to showcase design, you still need to remind the company of the capabilities, outcomes, and value that design provides.

As the leader, ensuring the visibility of the work will likely take extra effort on your part because you will need to take the work to them (there are no hallways in virtual space). Not unlike drumming up support for an internal initiative, getting design in front of business partners and executives requires creative thinking and promotional moxy. You need to communicate to your stakeholders, partners, peers, and executive sponsors. Also consider including the following groups: marketing, public relations, risk, compliance, and legal.

Newsletter: Nothing is more to the point than an update delivered straight to stakeholders and executives. A good newsletter should be visually interesting and editorially provocative. Try to tell concise stories that link to more detailed versions, full prototypes, or design presentations. Be careful not to include everything in email; if it’s too long and not scannable people will stop opening it. Share your longer stories by publishing them to your company intranet or blog. This will also allow you to link to the stories and promote them in other channels like Slack.

Boards: InVision teams use Boards to do everything from provide a “war-room-like” space to showcase finished work in a case-study format. Design teams use this to collaborate on work with their partners (engineering and product) and across various areas of the business. The product makes it super easy to pull together group visuals, add comments, etc. in a way that’s reminiscent of the walls that you’re used to covering with work. It’s a nice non-PowerPoint option to help socialize a team’s activity.

Executive reports: Most executives leave the office on Friday with a weekend packet of reports, articles, etc. to read and review. Each month, the design directors of USAA’s Chief Design Office prepare a 3 to 5 page brief on their team’s activity for the month. The briefs are just that, short stories of the work completed with images showcasing the design team at work and the work itself. Each team brief is collected in a larger report for the entire line of business and sent out to all relative execs. Not only does this keep the executive in touch with the design activity of their product line(s), but also the activity across the entire business.

Playbacks: A wonderful practice from IBM Design is the “playback,” a type of meeting/presentation between the team, stakeholders, and executives/clients to keep everyone in sync. A playback is a reminder of the team’s current mission, priorities, a review of the current work, what the team learned, and it ends with a review of the next steps. Playbacks are conducted any time the team at large needs to get in alignment, which is often after the design team has finished a phase and is about to move onto the next.

Open house: Just because you’re remote doesn’t mean you can’t host an event. While he was Global Head Of Design at Citi, Stephen Gates used to host an open house on Friday afternoons. Designers volunteered to show the work they had accomplished for the week. Anyone in the company was openly encouraged to attend as part of an effort to teach what his design program is capable of doing.

No matter what combination you end up using, it’s more important that you’re able to share and distribute your team’s work on a regular basis (not too frequent or interest will eventually drop, but enough to keep visible). Remember that repetition is super important. Don’t leave this vital communication up to a single distribution method. Post links to prototypes in Slack. Add the links to your team’s Confluence page. And add Trello cards to “Review Design Activity” in various backlogs. Get creative and be seen!

Develop better collaboration with engineering and product management

There are plenty of articles online with ideas for collaborating with our partners in engineering and product management. Working remotely can make collaboration a bigger challenge, but it also presents an opportunity to understand your partners’ teams and needs. For all of the advice design passes around for developing empathy for others, it’s not often practiced internally. We’re not taking the medicine that we prescribe.

From my experience, it’s always illuminating to work with your engineering and product partners to discover what assumptions they have of design and of their roles. I once worked with a product manager who worked under the assumption that most of the design role responsibilities belonged to them. It took me a few months to figure this out, but when I did, I had an understanding of why it was so challenging to work with them. When I had this ah-ha moment, I wanted to scream—not at them but at me. How did I go so long without going through some simple activities to understand their perspective and vice-versa? What a gut punch. I didn’t feel very much like a design leader that day.

To build an effective, collaborative relationship we first need to listen and understand what makes our co-workers tick, what’s important to them, what they feel is important to us, and how their work is measured by the business. Likewise, they should have the same information and the same understanding about us. Set aside time between you and your collaborators to work together and run through discovery exercises so you can build empathy for each role. Keep doing this until you reach all of the major roles that you need to work with. Share these techniques and get more people in your company developing empathy for their partners.

Once we have a collective understanding of one another, then it’s possible (and very powerful) to co-create how we should work together. We can build work agreements (social contracts) that speak to how each role prefers to work. Together we can reshape our processes to be inclusive and thus set up the conditions for real collaboration. And we can do all of this while helping each other reach our objectives as a team and as individuals.

Speaking of collaboration, let’s talk about facilitating remote workshops

As time goes on in this new world, so must design and collaboration. Our profession has come a long way in demonstrating that we can provide value to the business. Working remotely or not, we have to continue that momentum. One of design’s strongest offerings is the discovery process to test new product or service ideas quickly and at fraction of the cost of a full engineering team.

Facilitating workshops remotely may seem difficult, but in my experience it’s really the same amount of effort and emotional energy that are focused slightly differently. Remember, design is not a function of a place and design-led workshops fall directly within that statement.

You will still need to set up the “room” and make sure there are enough supplies. Invitations have to be sent out and followed up to make sure folks are going to participate. And yes, there will be that person who is late and needs help finding the right link. I wrote a separate guide on facilitating remote workshops available on the InVision Inside Design blog complete with a view of a sample workshop setup we use in Freehand.

I can’t stress enough how important it is that design shows up with its A-game. And bringing our facilitation skills to future company problems is one of the best ways to do that while helping to ensure visibility for you and your team’s work.

Design-to-code when side-by-side isn’t an option

Translating work achieved during the design phase into development is perhaps one of the most important stages of creativity, because it’s when our design work becomes a reality. In other words, it doesn’t matter how well a product is designed if the end result looks and behaves nothing like what the team intended. It’s incumbent on every designer and developer to take this phase of work ultra-seriously.

A constant argument I hear against distributed teams is the need for designers to sit next to developers to cut down on time spent during the design-to-development handoff. Location aside, the desired outcome is a faster process with an increase in the quality of the code. Working remotely allows us to get there with a people and tools-first strategy.

Start by identifying what each role needs from each other during the phases of a project and who is responsible for delivery, communication, or both. Set up regular and ongoing times to check in. Next, bring in a tool like InVision Inspect to help reduce designer ambiguity and the need for developer interpretation between  design and code. This combined approach should not only improve your time to market, but also help to build trust between the two groups.

Meanwhile, do what you can to improve communication between designers and developers. When I was at Happy Cog, we had designers in Austin working with developers in Philadelphia. During crunch times it was common to see someone with an iPad open to a video chat session with a team member in the other studio. It wasn’t for a meeting or a quick “call.” They left it open and on for hours at a time to help mimic the feeling of sitting next to one another.

We did this a few times at the leadership level and I have to say it worked pretty well.

Centralizing and organizing resources

Trying to keep all of your team’s assets stored and documented in a single place is difficult enough. Working remotely can exacerbate the situation if you don’t have identified storage, directory architecture, naming conventions, and automatic and manual backup schedules mapped out for everyone to follow. Document everything and place that file in your root directory. And then pin that file to your team Slack channel for easier access in the future.

Your IT organization should already be on top of this, but if that’s not the case, you can invest the time now to ensure work does not get lost. Spend time as a team looking at where work should be stored and what tools should be used for which tasks. Document all of these things to serve as a reference for the team and use for onboarding of new team members.

Organize regular rituals around cleaning local drives and ensuring files are moved to cloud-based solutions that have their own backups. Perhaps use this as the activity to be done before you all head into a virtual weekly happy hour.

Single source of truth

One of the goals of InVision is to create a “single source of truth” or “home” where design lives. By organizing all projects in InVision, distributed teams have a centralized place to explore all the work that a team produces. This can make InVision an invaluable system of record for product design. And when design collaboration is centralized in InVision, all comments and activities are stored, preserving invaluable institutional knowledge for the business.

Team documentation and better handoff process for OOO

In a remote workplace documentation rules the school. This is especially true for anything operational. Documentation, stored in the cloud and pinned to team channels, are table stakes. And when something changes, update those documents as soon as possible and ensure that everyone on the team and your collaboration partners know what changed, why, and where those changes can be found.

This practice may be easy to remember for team operations, but what about individual team members? When someone on the editorial team leaves work for an extended period of time (vacation, maternity leave, etc.) they create a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) transfer plan to ensure a seamless transition of responsibilities and decision- making authority.

Identify who is leaving and for how long. Designate the temporary DRI along with their contact information. In addition, list out your own contact information while you’re  away and indicate your communication situation (will you have your work laptop? Will you have Wifi or cell service? Is there a huge time zone difference?) and finally the projects you’re working on, their status, and any notes about what needs to happen while you’re out.

DRI transfer plan template

Right people, Right tools

Critical to success is ensuring you have the right people working to solve problems together. Traditionally this meant designers working alongside developers and product managers. But we need to look beyond this core group and be more inclusive; we need more roles to bring their hard-earned perspective to the experience creation process. Take a look at the end-to-end customer experience and document all of the parts of the business that help to make that happen, from marketing and account executives near the beginning of the experience,  to the day-to-day use which likely involve customer success managers and different levels of customer support.

Just as designers hate to work solely from marketing’s “voice of the customer,” why would you  just settle on prioritized notes from customer service? Designers are equipped with frameworks and facilitation to get multiple voices in a room and empower them to co-create together not as a single voice, but a harmony of voices.

When we work remotely our day is typically filled using applications to connect and collaborate (e.g., Zoom, Freehand, Slack, Google Docs). And it begins to feel like everything we do needs a tool in the form of another application. I’m here to remind you that is not the case for design! We have a powerful toolkit that enables us to understand people, validate the problem(s) to solve, find needs to fill, and create innovative solutions that customers want to use. Your most powerful tools don’t require software; they require people.

Design thinking should always be your primary toolkit, working remotely or not. And you should know all of the people and all of the “voices” that you need to bring together to create the right, user-centered experiences. Get to know these folks and invite them into your team to hang out. Don’t know who these people are? Go find them! Don’t wait for them to find you. You’re the designer; you’re the curious one in the room. Stay curious!

Lastly, do what you can to make sure everyone has access to the same  tools and information. Few things are as challenging as not knowing what you don’t know that you don’t know because in the remote workplace it’s difficult to stumble upon answers to questions that you don’t know to ask.

All of this will help you promote and foster a creative work environment beyond the virtual borders of design. Share your knowledge and be an open book. The secret sauce is never in the what or the how, but the who. If you are known as the person who brings everyone together to solve problems then you may have ninety-nine problems—but working remotely won’t be one.

Think inclusive. Be inclusive. Work inclusively. Design inclusively.