Cold Arrival
It’s 11 degrees Fahrenheit as I step off the plane at Toronto Pearson International. I’ve been up for nearly 24 hours and am about to trek through the gates toward Canadian immigration. Getting here from 73-degree San Diego was a significant challenge. What would be a quick five-hour direct flight turned into a five-hour delay, then cancelation, and then a rebook onto a red-eye through SFO. And I can’t sleep on planes. On top of that, I’ve been recovering from the flu, so my head was still very congested, and the descents from two flights were excruciating.
After going for a short secondary screening for who knows what reason—the second Canada Border Services Agency officer didn’t know either—I make my way to the UP Express train and head towards downtown Toronto. Before reaching Union Station, the train stops at the Weston and Bloor stations, picking up scarfed, ear-muffed, and shivering commuters. I disembark at Union Station, find my way to the PATH, and headed towards the CN Tower. I’m staying at the Marriott attached to the Blue Jays stadium.
Outside the station, the bitter cold slaps me across the face. Even though I am bundled with a hat, gloves, and big jacket, I still am unprepared for what feels like nine-degree weather. I roll my suitcase across the light green-salted concrete, evidence of snowfall just days earlier, with my exhaled breath puffing before me like the smoke from a coal-fired train engine.
I finally make it to the hotel, pass the zigzag vestibule—because vestibules are a thing in the Northeast, unlike Southern California—and my wife is there waiting to greet me with a cup of black coffee. (She had arrived the day before to meet up with a colleague.) I enter my room, take a hot shower, change, and I’m back out again into the freezing cold, walking the block-and-a-half to my company’s downtown Toronto office—though now with some caffeine in my system. It’s go time.
The Three-Day Sprint
Like many companies, my company recently debuted a return to office or RTO policy. Employees who live close by need to come in three days per week, while others who live farther away need to go to the office once a month. This story is not about RTO mandates, at least not directly. I’m not going to debate the merits of the policy, though I will explore some nuances around it. Instead, I want to focus on the benefits of in-person collaboration.
The reason I made the cross-country trip to spend time with my team of product designers despite my illness and the travel snafus, is because we had to ship a big feature by a certain deadline, and this was the only way to get everyone aligned and pointed in the same direction quickly.
Two weeks prior, during the waning days of 2024, we realized that a particular feature was behind schedule and that we needed to ship within Q1. One of our product managers broke down the scope of work into discrete pieces of functionality, and I could see that it was way too much for just one of our designers to handle. So, I huddled with my team’s design manager and devised a plan. We divided the work among three designers. For me to guarantee to my stakeholders—the company’s leadership team and an important customer—I needed to feel good about where the feature was headed from a design perspective. Hence, this three-day design sprint (or swarm) in Toronto was planned.
I wanted to spend two to three hours with the team for three consecutive days. We needed to understand the problem together and keep track of the overall vision so that each designer’s discrete flow connected seamlessly to the overall feature. (Sorry to dance around what this feature is, but because it’s not yet public, I can’t be any more specific.)
The plan was:
- Day 1 (morning): The lead designer reviews the entire flow. He sets the table and helps the other designers understand the persona, this part of the product, and its overall purpose. The other designers also walk through their understanding of the flows and functionality they’re responsible for.
- Day 2 (afternoon): Every designer presents low-fidelity sketches or wireframes of their key screens.
- Day 3 (afternoon): Open studio if needed.
But after Day 1, the plan went out the window. Going through all the flows in the initial session was overly ambitious. We needed half of the second day’s session to finish all the flows. However, we all left the room with a good understanding of the direction of the design solutions.
And I was OK with that. You see, my team is relatively green, and my job is to steer the ship in the right direction. I’m much less concerned about the UI than the overall experience.
Super low-fi whiteboard sketch of a screen. This is enough to go by.
On Day 3, the lead designer, the design manager, and I broke down one of the new features on the whiteboard, sketching what each major screen would look like—which form fields we’d need to display, how the tables would work, and the task flows. At some point, the designer doing most of the sketching—it was his feature, after all—said, “Y’know, it’d be easier if we just jumped into FigJam or Figma for the rest.” I said no. Let’s keep it on the whiteboard. Because honestly, I knew that we would fuss too much when using a digital tool. On the whiteboard, it allowed us to work out abstract concepts in a very low-fidelity and, therefore, facile way. This was better. Said designer learned a good lesson.
Just after two hours, we cracked the feature. We had sketched out all the primary screens and flows on the whiteboard. I was satisfied the designer knew how to execute. Because we did that together, there would be less stakeholder management he’d have to do with me. Now, I can be an advocate for this direction and help align with other stakeholders. (Which I did this past week, in fact.)
The Power of Presence
Keep the Work Sessions Short
I purposely did not make these sessions all day long. I kept them to just a couple hours each to leave room for designers to have headphone time and design. I also set the first meeting for the morning to get everyone on the same page. The other meetings were booked for the afternoon, so the team had time to work on solutions and share those.
Presence Is Underrated
When the world was in lockdown, think about all the group chats and Zoom happy hours you had with your friends. Technology allowed us to stay connected but was no replacement for in-person time. Now think about how happy you felt when you could see them IRL, even if socially distanced. The power of that presence applies to work, too. There’s an ease to the conversation that is distinctly better than the start-stop of Zoom, where people raise hands or interrupt each other because of the latency of the connection.
No Replacement for Having Lunch Together
I’ve attended virtual lunches and happy hours before on Zoom. They are universally awkward. But having lunch in person with someone is great. Conversation flows more naturally, and you’re building genuine rapport, not faking it.
FigJam Is No Match for a Whiteboard and Working Expo Marker
Sketching super lo-fi screens is quick on a whiteboard. In FigJam, minutes are wasted as you’re battling with rectangles, the grid snap, and text size and color decisions. Additionally, standing at the whiteboard and explaining as you draw is immensely powerful. It helps the sketcher work out their thoughts, and the viewer understands the thinking. The physicality of it all is akin to performance art.
The RTO Question
As I said, I don’t want to wade into the RTO debate directly. There have already been a lot of great think pieces on it. But I can add to the conversation as a designer and leader of a team of designers.
As I’ve illustrated in this essay, being together in person is wonderful and powerful. By our very nature, humans are social creatures, and we need to be with our compatriots. Collaboration is not only easier and more effective, but it also allows us to make genuine connections with our coworkers.
At the same time, designers need focus time to do our work. Much of our job is talking with users for research and validation, with fellow designers to receive critical feedback, and with PMs, engineers, and all others to collaborate. But when it comes to pushing pixels, we need uninterrupted headphone time. And that’s hard to come by in an open office plan, of which I’m sure 95% of all offices are these days.
In this article by David Brooks from 2022 in The New York Times, he lists study after study that adds to the growing evidence that open-plan offices are just plain bad.
We talk less with each other.
A much-cited study by Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban found that when companies made the move to more open plan offices, workers had about 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions, while email and instant messaging use rose.
We’re more stressed.
In 2011 psychologist Matthew Davis and others reviewed over 100 studies about office environments. A few years later Maria Konnikova reported on what he found in The New Yorker — that the open space plans “were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation.”
And we are less productive.
A 2020 study by Helena Jahncke and David Hallman found that employees in quieter one-person cell offices performed 14 percent better than employees in open plan offices on a cognitive task.
I’m also pretty sure the earlier studies cited in the Brooks article analyzed offices with cubicles, not rows and rows of six-foot tables with two designers each.
The Lure of Closed-Door Offices
Fantasy floor plan of Sterling Cooper by Brandi Roberts.
Many years ago, when I was at Rosetta, I shared a tiny, closed-door office with our head strategy guy, Tod Rathbone. Though cramped, it was a quiet space where Tod wrote briefs, and I worked on pitch decks and resourcing spreadsheets.
In the past, creatives often had private offices despite the popularity of open-layout bullpens. For instance, in the old Hal Riney building in Fisherman’s Wharf, every floor had single-person offices along the perimeter, some with stunning waterfront views. Even our bullpen teams had semi-private cubicles and plenty of breakout spaces to brainstorm. Advertising agencies understood how to design creative workspaces.
Steve Jobs also understood how to design spaces that fostered collaboration. He worked closely with the architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson to design the headquarters of Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville. In Walter Isaacson’s biography, Jobs said…
If a building doesn’t encourage [chance encounters and unplanned collaborations], you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity. So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.
The atrium at Pixar headquarters.
Reimagining the Office
**
I work at home and I’m lucky enough to have a lovely home office. It’s filled with design books, vinyl records, and Batman and Star Wars collectibles. All things that inspire me and make me happy.
My desk setup is pretty great as well. I have a clacky mechanical keyboard, an Apple Studio Display, a Wacom tablet, and a sweet audio setup.
When I go into my company’s offices in Los Angeles and Toronto, I just have my laptop. Our hoteling monitors aren’t great—just 1080p. There’s just no reason to plug in my MacBook Pro.
I’ve been at other companies where the hoteling situation is similar, so I don’t think this is unique to where I work now.
Pre-pandemic, the situation was reversed. Not many of us had perfect home office setups, if at all. We had to go into the office because that’s where we had all our nice equipment and the reference materials necessary to do our jobs. The pandemic flipped that dynamic.
Back to the RTO mandates, I think there could be compromises. Leadership likes to see their expensive real estate filled with workers. The life of a high-up leader is talking to people—employees, customers, partners, etc. But those on the ground performing work that demands focus, like software engineering and designing, need uninterrupted, long, contiguous chunks of time. We must get into the flow state and stay there to design and build stuff. That’s nearly impossible in the office, especially in an open-plan office layout.
So here are some ideas for companies to consider:
- Make the office better than your employees’ home setups. Of course, not everyone has a dedicated home office like I do, but by now, they probably have a good setup in place. Reverse that. Give employees spaces that’s theirs so they can have the equipment they want and personalize it to their liking.
- Add more closed-door offices. Don’t just reserve them for executives; have enough single-person offices with doors for roles that really need focus. It’s a lot of investment in real estate and furniture, but workers will look forward to spaces they can make their own and where they can work uninterrupted.
- Add more cubicles. The wide open plan with no or low dividers gives workers zero privacy. If more offices are out of the question, semi-private cubicles are the next best thing.
- Limit in-person days to two or three. As I’ve said earlier in the essay, I love being in person for collaboration. But then, we need time for heads-down-focused work at some point. Companies should consider having people in the office for only two or three days. But don’t expect designers and engineers to push many pixels or write much code.
- Cut down on meetings. Scheduled meetings are the bane of any designer’s existence because they cut into our focus time. I tend to want to have my meetings earlier in the day so I can save the rest of the day for actual work. Meetings should be relegated to the mornings or just the afternoons, and this applies to in-office days as well.
After being in freezing Toronto for four days, I arrive back home to sunny San Diego. It’s a perfect 68 degrees. I get out of the Uber with my suitcase and lug it into the house. I settle into my Steelcase chair and then log onto Zoom for a meeting with the feature stakeholders, feeling confident that my team of designers will get it done.
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