How we learn new topics as a team in a short space of time and successfully engage in team building. An experience report to inspire joint learning.
"I can't seem to focus on one thing," "I don't know where to start," "Too many things happening at once" – comments like these began surfacing in our UI team and that wasn’t a coincidence. The pandemic pushed us to switch to 100% remote work almost overnight, and our colleagues were dealing with uncertainty, both in ongoing projects and in their personal lives. Even though our technical processes ran smoothly, the loss of spontaneous, in‑person conversation mattered more than we expected. When you’re working from home, you can’t just turn to the person next to you with a quick question or talk shop at the coffee machine. Everything suddenly required a scheduled meeting or a structured call.
Ongoing training is part of daily life in our UI team. Up to that point, we relied on tried‑and‑true methods: exchanging ideas in team meetings, peer sparring and critique on projects, and attending online and in‑person conferences and workshops. In 2021, however, in‑person events continued to be canceled, and other approaches no longer worked the way they used to. What once inspired us started to feel stressful. Instead, team members felt like they were on their own at home, with everything coming at them: unsorted, unfiltered, and in all its complexity. For many, this triggered a constant feeling that they hadn’t done their homework. The team shared feedback on the issue, and we were able to take action.
It was obvious something had to change. We wanted to build a system where people no longer felt left to fend for themselves and where growing together became a positive, energizing experience. We were inspired by Jerry Gordinier, UX Design Manager at Google, and his “Room to Breathe” talk at the Global Experience Summit in 2020. His guiding principle – listen to your team and then take concrete action – led him to create a dedicated time block for the group to explore new topics together. That idea resonated.
We set out to secure that same kind of space for our team alongside our client commitments. Per Gordinier’s approach, the time balance between day‑to‑day work and internal initiatives can be tailored by each company. We settled on an 80/20 split: 80% day‑to‑day design work and 20% dedicated training. Just as important, we wanted everyone to have a say in what happens during that time. So we defined the learning goals and content together within the UI team, aligning on outcomes, not just activities.
We decided to start with a three-month test run to kick things off. The plan was to block a four-hour time slot every Friday. During those hours, we committed to focusing fully on training and development, without any distractions. We used this framework not only to build theoretical knowledge, but also to try out new ideas right away and apply them directly in practice.
To make sure we were all on the same page, our team held an OKR brainstorming session before the first learning session to define the goals we wanted to achieve together. We also defined the related topics, clustered them, and prioritized them. Once we had drawn up the training roadmap, we were ready to get started.
The sessions themselves always follow the same pattern. There’s a short check‑in at the beginning, where everyone shares which topic they’re focusing on that day. This is followed by a flexible, self‑directed learning phase and, at the end, a check‑out in which everyone explains what they discovered, learned, or tried out. This structure ensures that nobody duplicates work and that everyone ends the session with the same level of knowledge. By re-articulating the content at the end while it’s still fresh, no extra preparation time is needed, and the team can immediately validate whether there are clear areas of application in current projects.
As a team, we’ve learned how to work in Figma and Adobe XD, and we successfully migrated active projects and workflows from Sketch to those programs. We tackled the complex service area of design systems together, which means we can now advise clients with confidence while also building key elements – like the optimal structure of pattern libraries – directly into projects. The three‑month pilot was a complete success. Across 12 learning sessions, we developed capabilities that would have taken about a year using our old learning methods.
Even we’re a bit surprised by how many positive effects our Learning Out Loud format has had, and we’re proud to have shaped a structure that fits our team. We now know that with group learning, we can distribute complex topics across the entire team and move forward at a correspondingly fast pace. The format also reduces the anxiety around taking on too many new tasks at once, and it encourages each person to work more independently and analytically.
The team’s sense of togetherness is greatly strengthened by our shared goals, our shared sense of achievement, and positive group dynamics, which means our training now has real team‑building potential. These sessions are now an integral part of our week, and we can’t imagine working without them anymore.
Curious to learn more? Copy our Miro template to create your own Learning Out Loud sessions.
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