How well do you know your team?
By: Michael Kuhn
Tags: Team Building, Design, Teamwork, Culture, Agency

After reading the article, I immediately wanted to facilitate this activity with my own design team. If nothing else, it would be a fun team-building exercise to learn more about my teammates. The Figma Design team couldn’t have made it any easier for others to participate in this same activity. They created a community Figma file to show off their own trading cards as well as provide a helpful template for readers to create their own.

After a year of wanting to do this activity, I finally got the chance to do so working at Clade Design.

The remainder of this article will review the benefits of this activity as well as how to facilitate this exercise on your own team.

So, why should my team do this?

The benefits of this activity are simple; it’s all about understanding your team. By knowing your co-worker’s preferred working style you can better communicate, collaborate, and ship great work. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, but knowing them helps to better pair people with the right projects or tasks.

For us at Clade, we get a lot of different projects that vary in the scope of work. When taking on new projects we take a look at the project’s deliverables and consider everyone’s skill set to determine who would be the best person for the job. To clarify, let's use an actual example.

Logan is really great at illustrations and visual design whereas Sara has a mind for user experience and journey maps. Say we have a client that would like a variety of spot illustrations for a new app and another client that needs a UX audit of their existing site. Although both Logan and Sara are capable of doing both jobs, they have their strengths and it makes sense to leverage them.

You may have guessed it but Logan would take on the spot illustrations and Sara would handle the UX audit. The point here is it’s important to have the right person for the job while making sure they enjoy the work as well.

This trading card activity helped to restate some of the obvious strengths and weaknesses as well as provide more insight into each other’s preferred working style.

How do I facilitate this activity?

As I said, the Figma team couldn’t have made this exercise any easier for you to conduct yourself. I wouldn’t even limit this activity to just designers or even a work setting. You could do this with your friends, your family, your book club, even your fantasy football league. There is a lot for anyone to gain from this activity. Not to mention it’s pretty fun to design your own trading card. As long as you have some understanding of how to use Figma, anyone can participate.

Here’s how to get started:

You can find the Figma template file here. Just duplicate it and share it with your team.

The template has pre-existing questions that we primarily used but feel free to customize them however works best for you and your team.

Next, block off some time with your team so people make time for the activity and it doesn’t feel like more work. Between 30 mins to 1 hour should be plenty. Allow enough time for participants to have fun with it, but not so much that they begin to overthink it.

Be sure to leave some time in the end for everyone to present their card to the team. Everyone needs to read all of the cards. You may be surprised by some of the results.

If people need more time to finish up, that’s okay too. However, the hope here is to finish these within the allotted time frame to avoid creating more work.

Lastly, don’t forget to have fun and keep an open mind!

Check out our designer trading cards here at the Figma community page and let us know how it was conducting this activity with your own team.