One big, (mostly) happy family

After BILL acquired Divvy and Invoice2Go, 3 design teams were suddenly 1, and our new team was over 100 people. Our newly-minted Design Ops team started a series of monthly all-hands to help us share our work and get to know one another.

The Design Ops director reached out to me to ask if I’d be willing to facilitate ice-breaker activities for these meetings. I said yes because I find most icebreakers to feel painfully awkward/forced, and I wanted to make these feel not that way.

The Design

I leaned in to the brand work that our team had done for our Summer 2022 Design Summit that celebrated the teams coming together — I figured that using the same gradient would evoke the good times we enjoyed and the spirit of camaraderie. I also thought the gradient just looked dope.

The idea was to make something visually interesting that would give me room for cool prompts and give folks plenty of space to answer.

The Live Activities

I tried to keep the instructions simple, fun, and easy-to-follow.

We had tons of participation and lots of fun conversations in the comments!

I was thrilled at the results.

The Reception

I was stoked to get solid feedback from my peers. The foundations were good, so future months were basically small tweaks to the same format until we collectively felt that we’d broken our fair share of ice and moved beyond icebreaker activities.