Feb 13, 2026
Since joining Cabify, everyone on the design team seems to have an opinion about my designs. They ask questions, challenge assumptions, bring their own ideas, and occasionally even say something nice. And that’s one of the things I enjoy most about our way of working: design critiques.
A design critique is a structured conversation about a design with the goal of improving it.
In a critique, a designer presents a problem they’re working on and shows their designs. Other designers review the work and share feedback. Feedback is meant to be specific and constructive. It’s not about personal taste, but about helping the design meet its goals.
In Cabify, product designers are organized by audience (rider, driver, logistics…), and each audience team runs one public design critique per week. This means each of us can attend multiple critiques.
The presenter books a slot for the next critique and shares the agenda in advance. The meeting is recurring and listed on a public calendar, so any designer can join.
During the critique, they explain the problem they’re trying to solve and the type of feedback they’re looking for (visual, interaction, etc.), often sharing goals, context and relevant data.
They then walk through the designs (often multiple competing options), explaining key decisions, strengths and potential pitfalls.
Participants take turns giving feedback and asking questions, focusing on whether the design meets its goals.
Finally, the presenter gathers the feedback and decides how to act on it (if at all).
Sharing unfinished work isn’t easy. It often means exposing uncertainty, incomplete thinking, or decisions that aren’t fully formed yet. But that discomfort is also where much of the value of design critiques comes from. They help us improve the quality of our work, align as a team, and make better decisions.
Cabify has different apps for different audiences, like riders, drivers, logistics and B2B. Design critiques bring designers from these audiences into the same room (often a virtual one), helping build cohesion and protect the overall product experience.
When designers from different products come together, they start catching things that would easily slip through otherwise. These conversations help align decisions across products, instead of optimizing each experience in isolation.
They’re a recurring ritual, and like any ritual, they quietly shape what a team cares about. By reviewing work together week after week, we keep reminding ourselves that quality, clarity, and intentional decisions matter. Critiques set a shared sense of what “good design” looks like, and make it everyone’s responsibility.
Over time, this creates a culture where feedback is expected, collaboration is normal, and improving the work matters more than defending it.
As a designer, there are things I’m better at and others where I struggle more. Happily, some of my teammates happen to be really good at the things I struggle with, and I like to think I can help them sometimes too. Critiques make those differences visible in a way that benefits the work, not individual egos.
When these different strengths come together in a critique, they help fill each other’s gaps, leading to a more thoughtful solution than any one designer could arrive at alone.
How you communicate an idea is often as important as the idea itself. Designers spend more and more time communicating their ideas to product managers, engineers, and other partners, trying to get buy-in and validation. There might be a secret to improving design storytelling, but the only reliable way I know is practice.
Design critiques offer a great space for that, in part because they help counter the curse of knowledge. Presenting designers are forced to clearly frame the problem, provide context, articulate design decisions, and choose what to leave out to keep the message clear. Most of the time, participants in a critique don’t have nearly the same context as the presenter, so the designer has to help them catch up.
Critiques often reveal what the design communicates in practice, not what the designer intended, and that gap is where most of the learning happens. They also force conciseness. Whether you’re presenting or giving feedback, time is limited, and often more than one designer needs to present.
Design systems don’t live in libraries or Figma files. They live in the decisions designers make when applying them to real product problems.
Design critiques are one of the moments when those decisions become visible. When several designers review the same work, they’re not just reacting to a screen. They’re seeing how another designer is interpreting and using the system in context. That naturally raises questions like: Is this pattern being used where it makes sense? Are we stretching a component beyond its intent? Is this an edge case the system doesn’t fully cover yet?
Sometimes this shared view helps catch inconsistencies early. More often, it helps align interpretation. Critiques stress-test the design system against real product problems, with multiple perspectives in the room.
By discussing not just whether we follow the system, but when it makes sense to adapt it, critiques turn individual decisions into shared understanding. This keeps the design system a shared language and helps it evolve coherently as the product grows.
One common fear around design critiques is that they lead to design by committee. If enough people have an opinion, the final result can be a design that tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing no one. That can happen, but only if every piece of feedback is treated as a requirement.
At their best, critiques teach the opposite. As a presenter, part of your role is deciding what feedback to incorporate and what to leave out. You hear different perspectives, sometimes conflicting ones, and quickly realize that you can’t act on all of them. You have to decide which feedback makes the work better, and what doesn’t fit the problem or the constraints you’re working with.
Designers are expected to become more confident in their own criteria, better at explaining their choices, and more comfortable disagreeing when it’s justified. The goal of a critique isn’t consensus. It’s sharper judgment and stronger decisions.
That’s why others critique my designs. Not to reach consensus or decide for me, but to challenge my thinking, expose blind spots, and improve the quality of my decisions. Every designer gets things wrong sometimes, and seeing a problem through other people’s eyes often reveals things we’d miss on our own. The responsibility still sits with the designer, but the work is better for having been tested in the open.
Product Designer
