Navigating Design Reviews

Navigating Design Reviews: The Art of Matching Altitude to Audience

Through participating in design reviews across organizational levels, I've identified three distinct types that require fundamentally different approaches:

Executive Reviews (Type 1) focus on strategic positioning. Executives want to understand our current shipping timeline, future roadmap, and competitive landscape. They're asking: What are we delivering now? What's our long-term vision? How do we dominate this market space?

Design Leadership Reviews (Type 2) center on execution readiness and team presentation. Design leaders evaluate whether we've thoroughly considered all aspects of our work and how we'll represent our progress to executives. They catch obvious gaps, those "three-foot details" that could undermine our credibility.

Product Triad Reviews (Type 3) are purely operational, focused on shipping constraints and immediate deliverables. This isn't the forum for innovation discussions or blue-sky thinking. Teams often grow frustrated when higher-level strategy enters these tactical conversations.

The Cost of Misaligned Communication
Discussing the wrong topics in the wrong rooms creates unnecessary friction and contributes to team burnout. When feedback spans multiple altitudes within a single meeting, teams scatter their energy trying to address every comment simultaneously, regardless of priority or feasibility.

A Layered Feedback Framework
I've developed a structured approach to giving review feedback that acknowledges these different operational levels:

For shipping: Immediate, actionable feedback for current deliverables
For building next: Medium-term considerations for upcoming cycles
For innovation: Long-term vision and next-generation possibilities

We prioritize these layers, tackling short-term needs first while keeping long-term goals visible. This approach demonstrates holistic thinking to executives while respecting current constraints, whether technical dependencies, capability gaps, or organizational silos that may not be explicitly discussed.

Making Executive Lives Easier
When time is limited, focus presentations on immediate shipping milestones (the moment of truth) and supplement with detailed documentation and prototypes for future considerations. Executives operate at a different altitude, managing concerns that extend beyond immediate shipping and building activities. By organizing our communication to match their perspective, we enable more effective decision-making in the rooms where we're not present.
The key insight: successful design reviews aren't just about great design. They're about delivering the right information to the right audience at the right altitude.