Finding Balance in Design Team Collaboration
Craig Aucutt / September 13, 2025
I’ve been wrestling with a challenge that many product design teams face: how do we balance vertical focus with horizontal collaboration? On paper, vertical focus works fine. Each designer tied to a product area or feature, with clear goals and ownership. But when the work requires horizontal overlap shared experiences like navigation, accessibility, or consistency, things start to break down. Designers can get stuck, unsure of their role, and sometimes burned out from trying to cover too much without clear collaboration or communication.
How Design Teams Tend to Be Structured
Most design teams evolve into one of two shapes.
Vertical focus (pods, squads, feature teams): Designers embed with engineers and product managers, focusing deeply on one feature or user journey. This creates speed and alignment but can lead to silos.
Horizontal focus (architect teams, design systems, shared practices): Designers work across products to ensure cohesion, scalability, and shared standards. This avoids duplication but often slows down or confuses ownership if communication is weak.
Some organizations try hybrid model pods supported by design system or architecture groups but even then, the balance is fragile.
When Things Work, and When They Break
Vertical pods work best when designers also have a strong community of practice to return to. Without that, they risk drifting apart in quality or direction.
Horizontals succeed when they aren’t working in isolation. If they connect regularly with pods—through working sessions, shared critiques, and open communication—they provide real value. But if they only act as gatekeepers, they slow the work down.
The biggest breakdowns happen when:
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Horizontal ownership isn’t clear, leading to confusion about who should do what.
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One designer ends up doing it all, creating bottlenecks and burnout.
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Collaboration is passive—limited to reviews instead of co-creation.
Approaches that can helps
I've gone through this several times and for me I most often see where a high communication, collaborative space often leads to less friction. But how clearly can this be done. here are a few ways:
1. Build a “Yes And” Culture
Borrowed from improv, this mindset means designers build on each other’s ideas instead of shutting them down. Instead of “that’s not in the system,” the answer becomes, “yes, and here’s how we can adapt it to fit the system and the feature.”
It prevents the “us vs. them” dynamic between pods and horizontals. One Redditor described bi-weekly “design snaps,” where each designer shared quick visuals of their work so others could riff and add ideas:
“Super fast … way to skim what everyone is doing and you can dig deeper if interested.” - Source
The effect: less competition, more collaboration.
2. Collaborate Frequently and Live
Collaboration works best when it’s frequent and synchronous. Co-working sessions, design sprints, critiques, even “trifecta meetings” (designer, PM, engineer) help catch issues early.
A Redditor explained how their team stayed aligned:
“We also have ‘trifecta’ meetings weekly with me, PM and Engineering manager so we are constantly in sync on scope work and roadmap planning.” (source )
At Pinterest, teams leaned heavily on rituals like weekly critiques and design all-hands. One designer said:
“At Pinterest, we had strong team rituals … weekly Design All-hands, a Pillar-wide design meeting, and a weekly Crit, and this brought a lot of peace to our schedules.” - Source
3. Keep Communication Visible
Shared boards, working-on logs, and open updates reduce duplication and misalignment.
A PM noted how even something as simple as having designers join daily stand-ups kept everyone on track:
“It’s helpful when small design clarification questions arise, Designers have a better sense of what’s going on ATM.” - Source
Communication is less about volume and more about visibility—making work easy for others to see and build on.
4. Spread Out Horizontal Ownership
When one designer owns all of navigation, or accessibility, or the system library, burnout follows. Better: distribute ownership and rotate responsibilities.
Teams that succeed set up shared leadership—system leads partner with feature designers, and contributions flow both ways.
As one designer put it bluntly: “Being system owner + feature design lead + component library upkeep … is unsustainable. Spread it out.” - Source
5. Use Rituals and Cadence to Create Cohesion
The best teams don’t leave collaboration to chance. They formalize it: regular critiques, show-and-tells, retrospectives focused on cross-team alignment.
At Pinterest, weekly critiques weren’t just about polishing pixels—they were about seeing across pods, spotting overlap, and keeping the design language coherent.
These rituals make space for collaboration before problems become crises.
6. Choose Tools and Documentation That Enable, Not Control
Design systems, component libraries, and shared docs are powerful—but only if they feel supportive rather than restrictive. Teams that thrive document decisions with context (why this choice was made), not just rules. They make systems extensible, not rigid.
As one product leader wrote:
“Pick the right tools and establish communication standards … Clear tools and norms reduce misunderstandings.” - Source
Conclusion
Balancing vertical focus and horizontal cohesion isn’t a one-time problem—it’s an ongoing practice. Teams that succeed do so not by picking the perfect structure, but by creating the culture and rituals to support it.
From “yes-and” mindsets to weekly critiques, from rotating ownership to visible communication, the methods aren’t fancy—but they work. The goal isn’t control, it’s cohesion. Not one designer carrying it all, but everyone lifting together.