­We're a growing team, so we're always open to new process ideas to help us refine how we get things done, but we generally work as follows:

Flexible roles

One of the key values of TOPP DZN is that design is everybody's business. While we're proud of the expertise cultivated by our members, we recognize the value of overlapping roles and responsibilities. 

Weekly Meetings

1. Ideas and topics for discussion are collected by Rollie. Throughout the week, Rollie collects ideas and progress on individual work. This helps set the agenda for our weekly meeting and keep us focused during short iterations. Designers are also encouraged to share their ideas and progress with other team members on our mailing list if they deem it useful.
   
2. We meet weekly to discuss our ideas and recent work­. Meetings are usually on Wednesdays at 10:30am, though we've been known to deviate during special periods (like Woonerf). They're almost always in the middle of the week, early in the morning, and about an hour long.
3. We assign short-term projects at the weekly meeting and break out to work. We usually work on projects individually, though pairing has been known to work well from time to time too. Everyone on the design team is a great resource and very willing to help—when in doubt as to what direction to take, it's always great to share things on the mailing list. Progress on individual work is usually discussed at the following weekly meeting.
4. Return to Step 1.
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Pair design

Like our developer counterparts, the TOPP DZN see the value in pair design: increased discipline, better design documents, resilient flow, shared knowledge, mentoring, and team cohesion, to name a few.

Productivity Tools

Being a tech company, we're blessed with a large toolkit of productivity tools to help us stay organized. Unfortunately, technology is only half the battle, the other is a common set of norms around using these tools which is collected below. Each project we work on has its own set of tools and communication channels and each designer is responsible for familiarizing themselves with the the workings of projects to which they are contributing. Livable Streets, for example, uses OpenPlans to define long-term goals and strategies, a mailing list for shorter-term communications and requests, and Trac to manage the various software products that support it.