Wait, Did We Just Collaborate?  ## Metadata - Author: [[YouTube]] - Full Title: Wait, Did We Just Collaborate? - Category: #articles - Summary: In this discussion panel, Laura Kalbag leaded our guests through a discussion about collaboration, workflows and ownership, with Open Source at its heart. The best possible way to wrap-up Penpot Fest 2025. The panel “Wait, did we just say collaboration?” featured Glòria Langreo, Senior Design Director at GitHub; Layshi Curbelo, Founder & CEO at Command Z; and Catina Yiu, Curriculum Lead at CGGE. *Penpot Fest 2025 | Better, together: Refining the designer-developer workflow.* -- Penpot is the free open-source design tool for Design & Code collaboration. https://design.penpot.app​​ Penpot is ideal for product design: UI designs, prototypes, wireframes, mockups, webs, apps, and much more. Penpot allows a true collaboration and no handoff drama between designers and developers thanks to features like CSS Grid Layout, Flex Layout and Code Inspect. Designers get a professional, intuitive, powerful design tool with ground-breaking responsive layouts, design systems at scale. While developers get a design tool that expresses as code and provides ready-to-use code to develop faster. Penpot is the only one that can be web-based or self-hosted. The app works with open standards (SVG and CSS) avoiding vendor lock-in. Also, it enables teams the flexibility and control in their designs, thanks to the API and webhooks available. Penpot Community: https://community.penpot.app App: https://design.penpot.app​​ Help: https://help.penpot.app​ Contribute: https://github.com/penpot Penpot Fest: https://penpotfest.org Follow us: *Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@penpot/​ *Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/penpot.app *X: https://x.com/penpotapp *LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/penpotdesign *Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/penpot.app/ *Github: https://github.com/penpot Penpot: Design as code. - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUjZOOPo-XE So what a fabulous event it's been. Everyone having a good time? You're still awake? Brilliant. Now, in case you couldn't tell from the rest of this event, the overarching theme has really been about collaboration and that we are better together. You see it all over the place. And in this panel, what we want to do is we want to dig a lot more into this a bit deeper. We want to be honest with each other. This is not the time for theory. This is the time for practical. This is the time for being real with each other. If you know me already, you know this is how I roll. I don't really do the otherwise. I like getting into the real opinions nice and quickly. So we're going to do that. And we're going to learn a bit more from these fabulous folks we have here. And so I'm just going to give a quick intro. Obviously, you know them all already. So right next to me, we have Layshi, who gave a fantastic workshop yesterday on accessibility. So the go-to person on accessibility at this event. And Gloria, who gave a fabulous talk that really went into, honestly, the basics of this panel completely talking about collaboration. And then, of course, Katina, who, along with Tim, spoke about the role of open source in education and how they develop curriculums to help give students real practical skills. And so these are all things that collaboration is obviously key. And of course, open source is always running under everything we talk about within Penpot, really. So we will have some time for questions at the end. We'll see how we go. And so if you do have any burning questions in your mind, keep them in there. OK? So let us start off with, what does better collaboration look like to us in practice, not just in theory? And I'm going to go to you first, Gloria, because I'm basically saying, your fabulous talk yesterday, what are some of the key takeaways that you have from that? And yeah, what does better collaboration look like to you? I think probably I would like to hold on one word of the question, which is how it looks like. I think great collaboration doesn't look like it. You cannot see it, because it just happens naturally, right? I think we tend to default to, oh, to be able to collaborate. We need to be in all the meetings together. Everyone needs to be everywhere. We have to have like all these many rituals and stuff going on. So it's very visible that we are collaborating when real collaboration is as smooth because you've reached this consensus on stuff like you agree already on things. You just keep rolling. You can barely see it because everyone understands the why are we doing things. And then the moment everyone understands the why and the how, you don't need to be meeting in every three days, right? Like to check in and to make sure we are all aligned. Yeah, you don't want to be performative about it. It's doing it for real. It feels like all these frameworks to collaborate are like about doing things. So that is like, but yeah, while I'm doing this, I'm not actually collaborating. Yeah, maybe the useful educational tools, if you're still learning how to effectively collaborate or if you're struggling. But yeah, get into it. I love that. So how about you, Katina? Now, obviously, you're not necessarily doing a design development collaboration or I mean, to be fair, not everyone here is a designer or a developer. I think there's a whole range of roles and interests and things like that. But you have to foster collaboration inside of your students as well and in your curriculums. So what does better collaboration look like to you? I mean, the better collaborations have some crucial points. So the first point would be, how do we learn from the past experience? No matter it's good or bad. So for me, I would like to use a case study to explain of it. So for me, so last year we tried to do the brand combinations because we were lack of experience. So in this year, we tried to make several changes. So like we established a team that the experience can show their expertise, like their contact links to the school, designing the programs as well as how to do the social media. So I think it's all about how a team work together. So push them to do more better. So in a customer setting, about how to establish good collaboration between a teacher and student is to encourage students a lot. Because hopefully in a customer setting, they have fast learner and slow learner. You have to understand what they need. Like when I teaching in the classes, like the brand classes, so I will think about how can I set the different trap points for students to achieve and make them feel comfortable, not feeling isolated or feeling boring for the lesson. Yeah, so flexibility is so much a key part of it. It's no one thing fits one person, truly. And how about Layshi? What is better collaboration? Because you work with like massive companies and organizations who are big and hard to move. And you also have smaller collaboration within your team at your own organization. I would say, and I love how you mentioned in terms of education, understanding which is the person when you are collaborative. For example, when I was giving my talk, my workshop yesterday, I was start talking with people beforehand to understand what was the public, what was the needs, what was the knowledge that they have. And I think sometimes when we collaborate, we are trying checking the list, as Gloria mentioned, like, okay, if we will collaborate, we will do a meeting and then we will pass the files and all that kind of stuff. But the reality, I mean, for me, in practice is understand the constraints. If this user in particular really likes to be collaborative without the camera off, because they don't want to show their faces, okay, great, let's do that in that way. So you'll feel more comfortable. So understanding those constraints, understanding their needs of the person that will collaborate with you, I think it's the best way to actually make a good connection. Yeah, and being generous about it. Not to make about what you want, but what they need to. Yeah, I love that. And this question we have phrased, where do most workflows between design and development break down? But I would maybe also rephrase it slightly as to where do most workflows in general break down? What small change could fix it? Where is this friction and how can we avoid it? I'll go to you first on this, Katina. For me, I think the breakdown between designers and the developer mostly is related to if they have a proactive communication between them. So basically in the debug or testing basis, some designer may just send a file to the developers and waiting for their feedback. But during this moment, some developer may just waiting for the design team to call them for have a meeting and check the progress. So I think it's because the lack of the proactive communications. So furthermore, I think it's very important to have a person work as a cost functional roles like a team player, like how can inspire others and give a possible feedback as a bridge between the developer team and also the design team. And that really reminds me of what Gloria was saying in your talk about being close to the metal, about having that understanding of the platform. And often the people that do that are the people that are best able to communicate across the entirety of the team because they have that understanding of each other's roles. And this compartment. I chose the most long longest word in English. Compartmentalization. That one. I don't deserve points. I'm a native English speaker. What's the worst word they could pick to say now in public? So yeah, that word. What Katina was saying, developers are waiting and designers are waiting. Why are you waiting? Just go on each other's tools. And this idea that we have, no, this is where my work stops and the other person once starts. Let's try to break down this silos as much as we can. And a lot of that is because I guess we love using tools and talking about tools. We work in technology. We're excited about the tech. But actually so much of it is people, isn't it? And it's the people issues and the personal issues that is what's making this better or worse as well. Yeah. And how about you, Layshi? Where do you think workplace break down? I have a controversial one. Oh, please do. So I think it's be proactive. Sometimes we are just waiting for someone to give you a direction or just waiting for that email to start collaborating. I'm that kind of person of if I'm in an office, I will go around and see you screens like, hey, what are you doing? I want to learn from you. Sometimes that people is annoying. That's me. But when you are on a virtual scenario and remote work is differently. So how you can actually put that into the virtual remote scenario. So I'm the person that go into the Slack like, hey, what are you doing? What do you do for breakfast? To start sparking the conversation. And I think sometimes when we lose that kind of like human connection, even if it's digital, is when everything goes down and also taking into consideration that we are not proactive, proactive of building relationships in order to be collaborative in the long run. And I suppose that's even more important when you're remote from each other and you're not necessarily in the same room as each other, that it's even harder to have start those conversations and be proactive in that way, because you're having to reach out digitally somehow. Sometimes I just take a picture. This is me saying on the morning, I just don't brush my hair. I mean, it's a little bit invasive. Not everyone has that kind of personality, but at least people on the other side laugh and we can start a conversation every time. Everyone is just making fun. So it's nice is adding a little bit of vulnerability. I was having a great conversation about this upstairs earlier, about if you're leading with vulnerability and showing, hey, we're not all perfect. You make it easier to open these conversations and be able to talk to each other on a real level rather than having to negotiate egos and insecurities. And I think you build also trust and confidence on your team. If you are vulnerable, people will be willing to be open to say their feelings when they have something that they really struggle and want to collaborate, but they struggle with something. Yeah, yeah. Something you were asking for a small fix. Yes. Right, part of your question to Layshi's point. For example, we created a Slack channel that's our team name, Dash Water Cooler. So it's like where you go to get your glass of water. It's a Slack channel and it's where we are sharing our... Random photos. Random photos, a link, something completely unrelated to work. I think it's like part of the glue of the team. Yeah, in this water cooler situation. It's also a private channel. Completely locked, like no transparency here. That's one area where there isn't transparency. Exactly, you don't want to have transparency here. And yeah, I think I love having it. I think I'd seen it in another team who were having it and I'm like, I'm so stealing this. Yeah, and you show that you're actually a human being that you're working with and not just a work machine. And that's just an avatar over there in the chat. Yeah. Actually, funny thing is whenever someone leaves the team because they move to another team or whatever, they stay in the water cooler. That's nice. I guess if it's like a physical office, you might still have the same thing. You might go back down to the water cooler on the other floor. I love that that's carrying on in the digital area. So these can be quite fraught relationships that we have and especially we're working remotely and doing these things async. How do we ensure that everyone feels ownership in this shared process and not just responsibility for their own individual part? We're talking about starting to open up and starting to push against each other's edges and you were talking about that previously, but do you have any other like tips that you would give for doing that? Layshi, to you first. Ownership. So again, I have a different style. Don't be shy to use it, but I have some warnings. Right? It's not for everyone. One of the things that I do with my team is that I try to put Easter eggs on the work that we are chipping to a client, but they feel that they have ownership and they feel that they can show in case on their portfolio because it feels that they have their signature there in some way. Even if we are working with design systems or things that are supposed to be consistent, that are supposed to be not change it, they try to put something, a little bit of spice there that it represents them, so they feel the ownership of I'm working this and it feels like, I mean, I know that design and art is not the same, but it's a little bit of piece of art from them. And every time that we do, we try to encourage that. And then we encourage sometimes to do it even as a team. Like we, as a design team, we try to do things differently and the way that we chip the projects, we try to put it something that people say like, I see that in some place. Yeah, because we work on it. So yeah, but that's not for everyone again. That's the way that we try to do it. But yeah, I would say that. And same question to you, Gloria. And I imagine that working in an organization where everything is assigned to people as a matter, of course, how does shared responsibility work in that sense? I will go back to something I was saying earlier, which is understanding the why are we doing things, right? And why and how are we going to ensure that this thing is done and how do you measure this thing is done correctly? Because, of course, as you said, most of the times it's like the business needs X and, you need to work on it. So it's not like you choose, sometimes you can choose, but it's not like the regular way of working. So I think understanding the why are you working on this is crucial because when you are doing meaningless work, oh, yeah, I've just been told to paint this wall color white. It's like, I mean, if it's milk gray, I don't really care, right? Because I don't even know why I'm doing this. But if I know this is because I need to project a movie and needs to be crystal white, then I will do it properly because I understand what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. So yeah, I think basically taking the time to transfer this information to the team is crucial instead of assigning tickets or tasks or whatever, because then it's pointless. Yeah, it becomes very siloed, and you're just a kind of cog in a machine. It's like check, check, don't know, like closing issues. Yeah, it doesn't feel very creative. And how about for you, Katina, I guess, is this amongst your students or in creating your curriculums? How did you interpret this question when you saw it beforehand? So for me, how to ensure everyone feels ownership is I think it's also related to how to generate a safe and collaborative environment for students to share ideas together. So for me, while during the teaching, I may establish some collaborative projects for students to do with. So like for Blender, some of them may be good at doing the character design, some of them may be good at doing the storyboard, and some of them may go into setting the cameras and something else. So all the students work together and they know what are they doing and know each other, what are they doing so that they can collaborate together so can let them feel collaborative, yeah. So it's also, I think it's let students to shift their mindsets from my own case to our outcomes. Yeah, it's a very important phase, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so I think a lot of this collaboration that we're having is not just happening sort of within teams of people with the same roles, but often it is happening across disciplines and whether that is design and development or whether that is from management or people managing projects, so the people working with them, leaders, to people that are part of a team. So in your experience, I'll go to you first back to Katina on this, what's one moment where this form of collaboration surprised you, whether it was in a good way or in a bad way? I would say it's a good way because I can see students or how they collaborate with each other and they learn from each other, even though some of them may be shy to experience their idea, but I think to have a very open and safe environment for students to work with it can help them feel very secure and be brave to share their ideas. So they do things that surprise you, often in that space, yeah. Or is it just how well they get on that's surprising? Yeah. Yeah. Fabulous, so how about, Layshi, you're continually working with people who are in different roles across your team and across your work. So I have a fun story. I was having the opportunity to work in a company that I was having a friend, he was from customer service, and we love to go together to reggaeton music concerts and that's why we actually get along and I remember one time we was actually in the kitchen and he said like, what that you do in design that customer service, it's not off. We have a drill of calls. I don't know what you guys do that all the customers are angry and I was like, huh, yes, we shipped something yesterday and he was like, well, you are actually messing with my work and I was like, oops. And after that, we start actually chatting in the kitchen every time. What are you doing? They will have more calls tomorrow. It was like, maybe. It was like, no, tell me. So we start talking and I think it was super fun to understand how my design has implications in other people's jobs and also understand from that experience like the huge impact that can have just a change of color or just a change of pixels on the bottom just from here to here and it was really eye -opening to me to understand also sometimes the stakeholders are not the only ones that have the expertise. They start saying to you like, you know what? This is the strategy. This is the thing that we need to do and it's like, interesting because customer service are telling us that the calls is about this, this, this, this. Do you really think about it that this is a good strategy? And it was like, okay and we start actually adding people from customer service into the meetings and I think it was a really valuable lesson to understand that sometimes design not only depends on what we think it's the core team. We can actually have really good data and insights from other people that maybe we don't think about too much or too often. Yeah, it's such a rich like place to get information from customer support. Yeah, you really find out what people are really pissed off about. Exactly, exactly. There's actually, I've never had to do it but there's actually many companies who have this as part of their onboarding, right? Like when you join the company you spend one or two weeks customer support. Oh, that's cool. You get the real tea and then, you know, like you go and then you do some rotation from time to time every quarter or I find it an excellent strategy to be honest. I heard about that and I think it's great, yeah. Like if you just change one screen maybe you have more calls. Just sit down and listen to those calls. Yeah, just answer some emails and like it. As one of the things I find really fun about working with Penpot is I love hanging out in the Penpot community because when I want to think about what am I going to make a video about next or what should our next hands-on demo be for and I go and see, okay, what's everyone asking about? What's the thing that we're getting lots of questions about that maybe people are confused about or want to learn how to use better. Perfect, easy inspiration for me and I have to do any work. That's why I was so nervous just to do on the workshop. I asked everyone how is your level of accessibility and everyone was raising hands and I was like... So yeah, there is never anything wrong with going back to the basics though. I think it's important to have a reminder of it for sure, absolutely. And Gloria, do you have any kind of experience that you've had in mind that were whether for good or bad? Can it be not from work? Yeah, yeah, please, please do, yeah. So the most obvious one to me have you ever bought a small piece of fabric from Ikea? Yeah. Have you ever seen the tag it has which is bigger than the product itself? It's like the legal team not talking to the product team. Yeah. I always look at it like why didn't they talk to each other? You know, they could have done it way differently. You know, like small toys like this Lush toys and they have like this massive label. It's like just put it in a bag with a paper. You know, like why did you do this? Yeah. So these kind of things always I'm always obsessed over these things not from work, but yeah. Talk to each other. This is how you know you have a designer mindset is that you pick apart the details and everything that you see. Yeah, yeah, like these casseroles like these cast iron casseroles. What's the brand? Le Creuset. Yeah. They have a 30 day trial. Did you know? It's like an enterprise. I love it. So I had to go through it just to see how it was in the physical world. So you went through it. Did you do it? Of course. And did they take it back? You need to experience the things and have the designer mindset always on. And did you send it back? Yes. Because it was incredibly expensive. No, right? Transparency you see. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So let's go on to a topic that I think is like something that a lot of us care about. One of the reasons a lot of us got into Penpot was because of it being open source. And I think open source, even though we haven't necessarily discussed it a huge amount, it's kind of been a theme, a second theme that's run through a lot of the talks. And even yesterday when we had the Q&A after your session, all the days are turning into one for me. Katina, because I loved in yours and Tim's talk where you were talking about the actual importance of open source in access for education for you. And so what roles does open source tooling, all the principles themselves of open source play in improving transparency and working together for you? So in Hong Kong, so basically most of the schools are choosing to use the proprietary tools as their default, as their main ticket tools because I mentioned before because every school can have the funding they get from the government. So most of them will use to upgrade their classroom or equipment, but they just overlook the importance of importing a good content in school. So basically because why we so eagerly to promote open source to teaching in Hong Kong because we find the opportunity that if school would like to adopt those open source tools, it can help them to do better because we know that open source tools is a good community that allows everyone to share, collaborate together. So it has a very transparent and farmer so everyone just can just to learn from each others as well as it's very good things for students to learn with. Yeah, and I think once you start realising the power of being able to use things that are free and open, you know to look for that in other tools and know that those other tools will often be a more affordable option or something that you have access to as well. Yeah, so Layshi, how about you? Because I guess in your work it's not necessary. Do you do much work with open source tooling? Do you make use of these tools? Yes, and I think it's really valuable that in terms of the accessibility industry, we have those kind of tools that help people to accommodate and personalise their experience for their needs. For example, screen readers are open source. It's super, super important so they can adjust it and they can use it for the specific purpose that they need. Sometimes for you can be just like reading the screen in a central novel like velocity, but for other people could be another different thing and having this opportunity and having tools that really are available as open source. Changed the game for people's life and independence mostly. Yeah, and it's important for people that actually need those tools, but also then for those of us who want to test with those tools, we have no excuse. They're available to us. We can try them, they're there. And how about you? There's a huge amount of open source in GitHub, so I guess is there any particular area that really is important to you? I think an area that often I keep repeating a lot, but whenever we talk with more junior designers or people who are starting to design or looking for their first roles, something I hear often is I don't have a portfolio. I don't have previous experience, so I have nothing to show. And you see a ton of folks, no shade, doing redesigns for millionaires for free over social. Like I redesigned Bob Blass logo or things like that. I always say don't do this. Don't work for free for these big corporations. Just go and look for an open source project that you can collaborate. Do the design there and then you will have a portfolio and you will have real work because by collaborating in open source projects, you need to deal with so many different people, different profiles, different backgrounds. You learn so much. It's real work experience. Real life constraints. Exactly. Real life constraints. You are designing around a need. There's a community. There's users. There's so much you can learn by having two open source projects in your belt that actually build your first portfolio. So to me, that's a space for design is still a bit not explored too much. There's the open source designer organization and I'm always like go there, talk to these people, start working on this project. It's a lot more obvious and easy for a lot of developers to get involved but for designers it is not as obvious to them to start off with. I think it's a great first step in the industry to be honest. We were having a discussion earlier about how this idea that it's not as glamorous or as shiny or as exciting as a lot of other projects but really your skill as a designer is making things that work for people and that are usable. It's not necessarily about all the shiny. Yeah and there's so I think where is Eriol? She's there. I was chatting with her the other day and she was telling me yeah maybe sometimes if something looks too good it doesn't breathe like open source. Why don't we change this thing? Let's make open source look great. And that's something we get with accessibility a lot of the time as well. People say that if it's accessible it can't possibly look good and you just say well that is how limited your imagination is as a designer. I hear that so many times like accessibility is just ugly. What are you talking about? Okay so this could be a fun one to lead on from what we were discussing. Let's imagine it is Penpot Fest 2026 and what is one thing you hope every product team or every team is doing differently? I'll go to you first Katina on that one. I think it's from my from your perspective is just seek yourself as a lifelong learner beyond your role. It's very important that I have you mentioned in the keynote yesterday was the designer and developer facing the challenge like the designer doesn't understand the technical constraints of the developers and also in the meantime the developer doesn't understand the design principle of the designer so they will cause a lot of misunderstanding. So if everyone would like to take a step further like they would like to learn the new things it will help the team to go together and work better. Yes, it's almost about the things that go beyond what your curriculums are teaching and encouraging people to have that mindset. Yeah, even though I'm a good curricular designer but I'm lack of the experience in developer just I'm not familiar with the programming skills so I like to find time for me and to learn about the programming and it can help me become a more better cross-functional roles that can communicate with the development team while we are having a different project that can keep the project and keep us smooth conversations. And they often say, don't they if you want to really learn about something well you have to teach it. Yeah, because as a designer you have to play around with different software know about their futures and know how to integrate those good things into your curriculum to teach your students. Yeah, absolutely. And so how about for you Laishi Penpot 2026 what do you wish everyone's doing? I have a comment and then I will answer your question. Okay, I'll just be a warning for anyone in the Q&A later if you do the same thing I'm cutting you off but you're allowed to. I think in this Penpot I have a huge surprise when I see that everyone know a little bit of accessibility and for me that was like one of my hopes that when I will be doing something at least I don't need to define what is accessibility. So for me it was like, whoa but in 2026 and I think this is contradictory in terms of my side I wish that I cannot need to talk about accessibility to be honest. I hate that my job is outed in different websites pros and services because they don't apply accessibility. My job it doesn't need to exist and I know I'm cutting my legs in terms of the money but it's the reality like I wish that this has not to be a topic. Yeah, there's no longer a bolt on that it's integrated into our roles naturally. Yep, exactly. Yeah, Gloria, 2026 what should we be doing? I don't know. Are we all retired already? And I don't know. We wish. I guess my anarchic heart whishes is maybe I was chatting with Andy earlier about how organizations have like all these complex org charts, right? With teams and at least big companies we have all these organizations and then people keep saying oh, we are shipping our org chart no? Have you heard like this thing? And there's a lot of effort trying to do like end-to -end work to not to stop shipping the org chart and I was telling Andy I think like we cannot not ship the org chart like that's how we work so just burn the org chart, right? Like if you start breaking the teams down and mixing people and like creating a fruit salad of different profiles and we stop being so protective I think of our roles of our reporting structures of you know no, I report to this person I cannot work to this project no. Like let's try to be less protective of our spaces in favor of yeah, let's ship our org chart it's fine our org chart is you know, completely transversal so I would want a bit more of that a bit more anarchy and team structures and like breaking a bit more shaking a bit the nest. Yeah, that totally follows on from what you were saying earlier about the collaboration being so much easier when you are being more flexible when you're like attuned to each other's needs when you're reaching out and stepping over into other people's roles too. Yeah, absolutely. Okay and I'm going to just slightly switch up the order because I want to try and get at least one question in and then we'll do we'll do a little lightning round as a finisher. So who has the power? We're going to have one or two questions I want really good ones now I've really put the pressure on as well has anybody got a question for our panel? I have a hand over here there's a microphone appearing behind you. Can you hear me? Yes, yeah we can hear you. Yeah, so thank you all for opportunity for answering questions wonderful talk so far one of the things that I was wondering we're heading into a world perhaps, right for telling like just people become ICs will become more generalists right designers can accomplish more with engineering tools MCP you know got built into Penpot, right? Thinking how do we facilitate collaboration in a world where individuals can come get the work done end to end you know there's like less need to pass it off to someone else I guess when you can both design and engineer I'm just curious what you might think about that future and how we can facilitate yeah collaboration yeah I suppose in a world where if you're all generous can't we all just do everything and get it all done by ourselves okay I'll phrase that to you first Katina and like how do you encourage students to learn a variety of those skills and where should they stop and how do they collaborate on that? So from my side I think it's important for teachers to know the student limit limitations like you have to set a very structural cost structure that have in each lesson you make sure you have outcome for student to achieve it so that allows student to know what they are doing and how to use this to collaborate with yeah yeah and so I guess in some ways we're looking again it's this idea of the shared responsibility if people are able to do things but how I guess in a world with no org charts would we then work out who has responsibility to get stuff finished? Gloria so I think when I say that is referring to your talk the keynote you delivered yesterday and with the T shape kind of thing I think we still need this right the specialization and people who can have like very very high craft on specific things and when I say like building end to end and being like I can you know participate in the whole flow it doesn't mean doing like the extra mile in each of the step right? It's like you can have a first pass or a first draft or a first direction that helps setting vision to the team but then you still need a specialist like you would never have someone who can craft like an excellent I don't know icon and can code all the way I don't know like the back end I feel like that would be I mean if you know someone please send a link but it's very difficult so you still need to collaborate right in these phases so this is why I really like the figure of the DRI so the person who drive the project that I think in most companies normally is the PM but I think this again time to torch these concepts and have designers driving initiatives end to end being the DRI of an initiative but then still having a specialist in each and then I think it's DRI's responsibility to ensure people are collaborating and are talking to each other Yeah and Layshi you and I were talking actually about this very topic yesterday because you have skills in many different areas as well how do you end up not ending up doing all the work in your team? Well first of all I think it's understanding what are the things that you really want to do and what the things you know that you're doing really well because I mean I love doing art but I'm super bad drawing super bad drawing and I know that somebody else can do it really better than me and having the trust that I have maybe the idea and I can just give my idea and collaborate with this person because I know that can actually elaborate something better that I can not do it because I don't have the skills necessary so I think having the trust and also like be mindful that it's cool to share your ideas and delegate not delegate just pass the baton and trying to work around with the things that you have and the other skills the other person has so it's more to actually be so I don't know putting in the other people's shoes and giving you the opportunity to change the way on this perspective of the things that you are doing Yeah and we have so much to learn from each other especially when we choose not to be control freaks Yes, yes, yes like for example I have one person in my team that she's amazing with visual design and I remember that in one moment a lot of clients start asking like and you helped on the UI I was like you know what I'm not good at that I'm not good at that and I was like you know what you are the right person to do this like I don't need to do this you are the person that have the knowledge the skills and this is what we need So thank you for the fabulous question we don't have time for any more questions but of course we will be hanging around later on we'll have time during lunch and networking and feel free to come up and chat we are all friendly, none of us bites, and so to sum up I think should we just we have one sentence from each of us What does better together mean to you right now? I'll go down from one end to the other Katina what does better together mean to you? For me it's to embrace diversity and build interest Yeah Love it It's because we come from different countries speaking different languages but we also come over to this lovely and wonderful patio to share to connect, to interact together so we also tracing we are just towards the same goals how do we work better to make a strong pandemic community so I think diversity is a very beautiful world to depict the name of variations. Absolutely Gloria I think I think very similarly to Katina like having different not only skill sets but diversity in all aspects in all the things is what makes us a better whole I think so diverse teams please more of that. Layshi Expansion of opportunities when we work together we can have more reach to do better things. Absolutely and I would agree with that I would say that better together means that we are all better than the sum of our parts and we can make we can have good individual relationships we can have much better teamwork but we can also start movements when we start working together we can start to really truly make a difference so thank you each of you for taking part in this panel this has been so much fun thank you everyone for such a fantastic Penpot Fest thank you to the Penpot team we wouldn't be here without you and thank you to our host Medet who has done so much work getting this all off the ground and the folks behind the scenes who aren't up on stage but are really making this all work and thank you big round of applause for that lot., Wait, Did We Just Collaborate?, YouTube, 01k8te43ywk8g6679r6463rhv1.