Meeting Design: For Managers, Makers, and Everyone - Softcover

Hoffman, Kevin M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933820381 ISBN 13: 9781933820385

Publisher: Two Waves Books, 2018

Synopsis

Meetings don’t have to be painfully inefficient snoozefests—if you design them. Meeting Design will teach you the design principles and innovative approaches you’ll need to transform meetings from boring to creative, from wasteful to productive. Meetings can and should be indispensable to your organization; Kevin Hoffman will show you how to design them for success.

About this title

About the Author

KEVIN M. HOFFMAN connects people, ideas, and solutions in order to solve our industry's pressing design challenges. As Vice President for Design Practices at Capital One, he takes responsibility for assessing, exploring, and accelerating all areas of design with a team of more than 70 very talented human beings. Prior to working at Capital One, he founded and led Seven Heads Design, a network of digital design thinkers who collaborated frequently on major projects. Trusted by major brands over his career such as Capital One, Zappos, Harvard University, Nintendo, and MTV, Kevin's roles as design thinker, agency founder, and product manager have given him a unique perspective on how people interact when they make things. Kevin regularly shares his insights at conferences around the world.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: How to Design a Meeting

When hundreds of hours of his design team’s sweat, blood, and tears seemed to go up in flames in a single meeting with a group of vice presidents, Jim could have easily panicked. So that’s what he did.

Jim is a creative director at a successful and highly respected boutique design agency—let’s call it “Rocket Design.” He found a fantastic opportunity for Rocket through a former coworker’s new job at a Fortune 100 client―they were ready to spend half a million dollars to build the best website experience possible in a competitive market: online meal delivery. After several weeks of discovery, his team had assembled a design direction that they believed could be effective. Baked into a collection of mocked-up mobile screens were strategies guiding content voice, brand execution, photographic style, and user interface functionality. To move into the next phase, Jim’s job was to make sure that the senior leadership at the company believed in the proposed direction just as strongly as his team did. Project managers on the client side navigated the rat’s nest of the leadership’s meeting availability to find a standing monthly hour in which Jim and his team could provide progress updates.

At one of these check-in meetings, Jim walked the gathered group of vice presidents and directors through a series of screens, stopping to accent unique elements and key decisions along the way. Despite asking people to hold questions until the end, there were a handful of odd interruptions, like this gem:

”That’s a really strong yellow. I just don’t know about that.”

Jim found the interruptions unnerving, each one forcing him to reset his presentation rhythm and remind the group to wait until he was finished. When he reached the end of his walkthrough, a bit rattled, he opened the floor for an unstructured session of comments and questions. The comments and questions came fast, furious, and, of course, unstructured, like invaders from all sides breaching a fortified position:

“What will you do differently to accommodate our unique business rules around delivery partners?”

“This must work within our existing JavaScript framework, so that will happen, right?”

“Were you aware that we’ve got an internal team working on this exact same issue, and they’ve already wireframed the whole thing?”

Jim struggled through, answering each off-topic comment and occasionally handing questions off to the most qualified individuals on his team. But his frustration wasn’t masked in the slightest: Jim interrupted people mid-comment, stammered when surprised, and answered brusquely with “that’s out of scope!” in response to the last few questions.

In conceiving the agenda for this presentation, Jim made an error that nearly cost his team the project. He didn’t design the conversation to help key stakeholders understand what had gone into all of these decisions. Instead, he did what he had learned to do by example from his boss, the previous creative director, which is often how agencies teach people to present work. Jim provided a “real estate tour” of the finished product, assuming the rationale behind the designs was obvious. But to client leadership that hadn’t been along for the ride, the destination was startling and unclear.

Edition details

• Publisher: Two Waves Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1933820381
• ISBN 13: 9781933820385
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 232
• Illustrator: Sutter Matt