Making Work-in-Progress Critique a Team Habit
A recurring, low-pressure critique gave designers space to share unfinished work, ask questions, and build confidence in explaining their decisions. Practical prompts, regular sessions, and individual encouragement helped the team grow more comfortable presenting and refining work together.
Sony Interactive Entertainment / PlayStation
UX Manager; critique format and feedback tools
7–9 designers across different program areas
Ongoing team-culture work; Design Lounge documented in 2026
FY24 GLiNT team-health survey results, reported separately below
Designers needed a useful place to share unfinished work
My designers worked across different projects, so a team meeting could easily become a collection of updates. I wanted it to help people examine the work together and learn from decisions outside their own area.
The first challenge was participation. Designers did not consistently volunteer work in progress. Sharing could feel like presenting something that was expected to be finished, which limited the opportunity to discuss the decisions while there was still room to change them.
I worked on both the format and the experience of participating. Creating a recurring meeting was only one part of that. Designers also needed to know what to bring, what kind of feedback would be useful, and how to talk through work that was not yet resolved.
Reshaping the team design sync
I turned the weekly design sync into a biweekly forum called Design Lounge. The structure kept the agenda to one or two topics, with rotating presenters. When there was no project ready for critique, the session could become an open design discussion or a guest share.
That flexibility let the forum retain a purpose without requiring polished presentations to fill the time. In-progress work was the priority. The team helped define the parameters for the sessions, which were captured in a poster.
I also gave a designer the opportunity to lead the Lounge as a growth assignment. My role was to establish the format and support participation, while creating room for someone else to practice facilitation and ownership.
Building presentation practice into the routine
I encouraged designers in 1:1s to bring work to the team before it was finished. This gave them a specific opportunity to participate, rather than leaving every session dependent on whoever felt confident volunteering.
The forum also became a place to practice explaining decisions. When someone struggled to hold the room, I facilitated. I used questions to help designers develop their own judgment and explain the reasoning behind the work, rather than waiting for me to give the answer.
Over time, designers became more comfortable sharing and refined their presentation skills. That was a qualitative change I observed through the practice. I did not measure it as an increase in participation or a numerical improvement in presentation quality.
Giving critique concrete questions
I wrote a short UX decision playbook to make review more useful. It covered working through ambiguity, justifying decisions through research or data, and checking the interaction itself.
The critique prompts were practical: does the design solve the problem, would a first-time user understand it, does it fit existing patterns, and are error states covered? These questions gave reviewers something more specific to examine than whether they liked a screen.
The playbook supported the forum without requiring every discussion to follow an identical script. It made room for designers to explain why a decision made sense and for peers to question the work in terms of the problem it was meant to solve.
Improving the specificity of feedback beyond critique
I applied a similar approach to a 360-feedback question bank. Instead of relying only on generic strengths-and-weaknesses prompts, I developed behavioral questions about collaboration, friction, and feedback someone needed to hear.
The format captured feedback in people’s own words and included confidentiality handling. My manager asked to share the question bank with the wider managers group. That was a separate sign that the tool was useful beyond my immediate team.
What changed, and how I measured the broader culture
The critique work produced a recurring forum, a decision playbook, and a more comfortable environment for presenting unfinished work. Designers developed their presentation skills through regular practice, and another designer gained experience leading the forum.
Separately, the FY24 GLiNT team-health survey recorded a 34-point increase in Feedback and a 39-point increase in Action-Taking, with gains in 12 of 24 focus areas. These results describe the broader culture work across management practices, 1:1s, critique, and retrospectives at that time. They predate the 2026 Design Lounge described here and are not a before-and-after measurement of that forum.
My contribution was to make feedback more specific and more usable in everyday work, while giving designers repeated opportunities to practice explaining and examining their decisions together.