Open a "design café" — A low stakes way to build your team's feedback skills

Photo by Katya Ross on Unsplash

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Good feedback is the lifeblood of collaborative product development. Yet most people in your organisation have never been taught how to give design feedback.

Engineering, data, sales, and support teams are experts in their own fields, but design critique is rarely part of in their training. We assume it comes naturally, but it often doesn’t.

Hierarchies and cultures can make it even harder. Junior staff hesitate to challenge senior opinions. Cross-functional peers tread carefully around each other’s domains. Even designers hold back when discussions feel sensitive or high-stakes.

The result is feedback that’s safe, polite, and not very useful, which impacts negatively on product quality and growth.

After 20 years in design, I've found the best approach is to give folks a safe place to practise. Enter the design café — an informal low-stakes space where anyone can learn to give better design feedback.

What is it?

Design café is a regular, low-pressure gathering where anyone interested in improving their design feedback skills can drop in and practise.

Sessions can run fortnightly or monthly, last no longer than an hour, and attendance is optional. There’s no agenda beyond helping people get better at giving critique.

I recommend to not critique your own products. Instead, participants bring examples they’ve found “in the wild” of apps or websites that caught their attention or created frustration.

Because nobody owns the work, the stakes are zero, and the focus is entirely on practice and learning.

If you bring snacks 🍿 people will show up.

How does it work?

1. Come with examples

Ask participants to pick a digital experience that stood out to them.

It could be a confusing checkout flow, a broken form, a feature they loved, a frustrating app, or a recent product update that surprised them. Positive or negative, it doesn’t matter: The goal is to have something concrete to discuss, that everyone can engage with and learn from.

Design cafe works best if you review your own products! With no one defending work and no roadmap implications, sessions become a safe space to experiment.

2. 5 minute show and tell!

One person volunteers or gets nominated ahead of time to share their example and explain quickly why it caught their attention. A few screenshots, a short demo, or a screen recording is enough.

This also limits the amount of work that people need to do beforehand. If you have lots of examples to choose from, you can share another example later or save them for the next session.

3. Feedback using a lightweight framework

Now the learning begins.

Guide the group through structured feedback. Identify the feature’s goal (from a business perspective), the user need it serves, what’s working, what’s confusing, and try to collect some evidence behind their observations — whether data, precedent, technical constraints, or anecdotal experiences.

This step trains people to anchor comments to real business goals and user needs rather than personal taste, separate observations from interpretations, and focus on problems instead of solutions.

Actively discourage them from offering solutions!

By practising in this structured way, feedback becomes clear, actionable, and transferable to real product discussions.

4. Coach in real time

During feedback, guide the discussion.

When someone jumps to a solution, frames a comment as personal opinion, or misses the underlying user need, gently redirect them to focus on goals, problems, and to providing some evidence.

Participants practise giving and receiving feedback with structure, learning to clarify their observations, justify them, and separate problems from solutions.

Praise good examples to help the right behaviours stick.

5. Repeat!

Do this once a sprint, and within a quarter, you will see positive results in reviews and in the product.

Why does it work?

The stakes are low

When no one's work is on the line, people feel safe to experiment. The absence of consequences creates presence of mind.

An engineer who'd never speak up in a product review will volunteer a thought. A support rep will push back without worrying about stepping on toes.

The muscle memory transfers

You don't decide to use better feedback in the moment—you've either built the habit or you haven't.

After a few sessions, people use the learning without thinking. They pause before prescribing solutions. They state their evidence tier reflexively. Then it shows up in your actual reviews, unbidden.

People learn how others think

An engineer explains why a pattern is expensive to build. A support rep shares what confuses users based on tickets. A salesperson names the objection that kills deals. Not in the abstract, but anchored to a real example everyone's looking at. People stop making assumptions about what other functions care about.

It's opt-in, so it's honest

Mandatory training breeds compliance theatre. The café works because no one has to be there. People who come want to get better. They're curious and invested.

That creates an energy where people can readily admit what they don't understand, ask genuine questions, and take what they learn back to their desks.

It normalises feedback as a skill

Many people think design feedback is based in instinct—you either have taste or you don't. Practising it regularly breaks that myth.

People will see themselves improving over time and stop treating opinions as fixed truths. The quality of discourse will changes across the entire organisation.

Top Tips

Start small!

Your first session will be awkward at times. Maybe only three people show up. That's fine and completely normal. Run it regularly and build momentum. By session three, you'll have regulars. By session six, people will ask when the next one is.

Rotate facilitation

Have designers run the first couple of sessions to show how it's done, then hand it off to others. Get an engineer to facilitate one. Then someone from support. Then sales.

When everyone puts something in, everyone gets something out.

Keep it light

This isn't a training course. Celebrate good feedback when you hear it. Stay curious, not academic.

People will want to come back when it's enjoyable.

Theme it occasionally

Try "Accessibility week" where everyone brings examples of inaccessible design. Or "Onboarding flows". Or "Error states".

Themes give people direction and keep sessions focused.

End with reflection

What did we learn today that we'll try in our next real review?

Use the last five minutes for a quick recap. Don't skip this.

Make the transfer explicit so the learnings stick.

What you'll notice

Start a design cafe at your company. Keep the stakes low. Run it consistently. The returns will surprise you. Within a few sessions, your design reviews will visibly improve.

Not because you changed the review process, but because the people in the room got better at giving feedback.

Comments will anchor to goals, not taste. People will cite evidence. They'll ask clarifying questions. Solutions will give way to problem statements. Contradictory feedback will lessen. Costly rework cycles will shrink.

The café isn't magic. Deliberate repetitive practice in a safe space transfers directly to product work and outcomes that matter.