Dlead Design Operating Rhythm

---
name: dlead-design-operating-rhythm
description: Builds a Design Team Operating Rhythm with every recurring meeting listed by purpose, owner, cadence and output, a keep, change or replace call for each, and the weekly and monthly rhythm with protected focus time on one page. Use for "run dlead-design-operating-rhythm", "too many meetings", "design team rituals", "team cadence", "meeting audit", "my designers have no focus time", "which meetings should we cut", "design team operating model", part of the Claude for Design Leaders Pack by Polar Bear.
---

# Design Team Operating Rhythm

## When To Use
The team's week is all meetings and nobody can say which ones decide anything. Designers say they design in the evenings, and the same topic comes up in three different slots. It answers: which meetings earn their place, where does each decision live, and what does a good week look like on one page?

## When Not To Use
If the problem is one meeting, crit itself, use Design Critique Ritual. If meetings drag because nobody knows who decides, start with Delegation Board. A team of two or three people may need a shared calendar conversation, not a rhythm document.

## Inputs
- The team's recurring calendar: every meeting with its name, length, cadence and who attends
- For each, what came out of the last two occurrences (a decision, an artifact, or nothing)
- The working norms already written, if any
If you have none of this, I start from your list of recurring meetings from memory and mark the output as a first draft.

## Approach
A keep, change or replace meeting reset, from team retrospective practice, adapted here for design. The judgment: a meeting is judged by its output, not its attendance, and no meeting is cut until its decisions have a new home. The failure it prevents: a lead cancels the weekly sync to free focus time, and a month later three designers have built conflicting versions of the same flow because the sync was where scope was quietly agreed.

## Workflow
1. Ask three questions: how many hours of protected focus time you want per designer per week (your number), which meetings you cannot change (set by others), and how long the team will trial the new rhythm?
2. Inventory every recurring meeting: name, purpose in one line, owner, cadence, length, who attends, output (decision, artifact or nothing). A meeting whose purpose nobody can state goes in as "purpose unknown", not a guessed one.
3. Call each one keep, change or replace. No output means a candidate to replace. For every replace, write where its decisions or information go instead (a written pre-read, another meeting, a channel, an owner).
4. Turn status narration into a written pre-read posted before the meeting, so the time left goes to questions and decisions.
5. Lay out the week and the month on one page: crit, design review, 1:1s, demo, retro, and the focus blocks. Check that crit and review are separate slots, and that focus blocks are not where meetings land.
6. Set the trial: the period, what you will look at (decisions made, focus time held), and the date the team calls keep, change or stop on each change.

## Output Format
```markdown
# Design Team Operating Rhythm
**Team:** [name] | **Owner:** [lead] | **Focus time target:** [hours per designer per week, set by lead]
## Meeting inventory
| Meeting | Purpose | Owner | Cadence and length | Who attends | Output | Call |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [name] | [one line or "purpose unknown"] | [name] | [cadence, minutes] | [roles] | [decision / artifact / nothing] | [keep / change / replace] |
## Changes and where decisions go
| Meeting | Change | Where its decisions go now |
|---|---|---|
| [name] | [new format, pre-read, cut] | [home] |
## The week and the month
| Slot | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [morning / afternoon] | [meeting or focus] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] |
**Monthly:** [demo, retro, other]
## Trial
[Period] | [what we look at] | [date for keep, change or stop]
## Decision
[Lead] confirms the changes with the team by [date] and calls keep, change or stop at the end of the trial on [date].
```

## Done When
- Every recurring meeting is listed with an output, or "nothing" written plainly
- Every replaced meeting names where its decisions go
- Focus blocks appear on the week grid at the lead's target
- The trial has an end date and an owner for the call

## Quality Bar
- Purposes and outputs come from what happened, never from the invite description alone
- No invented meeting counts or hours: every figure is the lead's
- No attendance tracking and no per-person meeting load in the output
- Crit and design review stay separate slots with separate purposes
- Every meeting kept has a named output; none is cut without a home for its decisions.

## Next
Run dlead-delegation-board (Delegation Board) to agree who decides what inside the new rhythm.

## About the makers

This pack is made by Polar Bear, a consultancy built by ex-McKinsey founders with a dream to make AI work for People, not instead of them. We help our clients build people systems and AI-first ways of working, and we run our own company on Claude. If your team has outgrown the self-serve version, message Pauline (linkedin.com/in/paulinebertry).