I’ve attended plenty of offsites where the leader shows up with the agenda, walks through the plan, and asks the team to execute it. This wasn’t that.
For our 2026 team kickoff, I brought the context and gave them the problem to solve themselves.
The morning was mine. I walked the team through who we were, how we were structured, and what we’d accomplished in 2025 — key outcomes, impact metrics, the stuff that often gets lost in the rush to the next project. A lot of them worked in different areas and rarely crossed paths outside of our weekly team lunch. Some hadn’t seen the full picture of what the team had built together. I bought lunch. That part mattered too.
In the afternoon I handed it over. I ran a Lightning Decision Jam — a structured workshop format I’d used before — focused on two questions: what’s driving us forward, and what’s holding us back. The themes that came up were real: cross-team collaboration, lack of process, not enough research and analytics, unclear direction from leadership.
That last one could have sent us sideways. When you ask a team to name what’s hard, they’ll name things that aren’t theirs to fix. My job was to redirect without dismissing. I asked them to focus on what we could actually control as a team. The leadership gaps were real and worth surfacing — but in a different room. Here we were deciding what WE wanted to own.
What we landed on: design would have more influence if we brought research and analytics in earlier, not just for usability tests before handoff. The team named it. Not me.
I took that output and built a full framework around it — a learning plan we called “Designing with Evidence.” It covered how critique would change, how we’d share signals weekly, how intake would work. The idea didn’t come from the top. It came from a Friday afternoon with sticky notes and a team that was finally talking about the same thing at the same time.
What I’d take forward: give the team the problem, not the answer. When they set the direction themselves, they own it differently.