This live dashboard was built for the Med Design Summit · November 2–3–4 · 2022 in Chicago. Every morning, before the day's sessions kicked off, I sent short "This or That" surveys to teammates organized into small Slack groups.
Burgers vs. Pizza? Mexican vs. Japanese food? Marvel vs. DC?
Simple questions. Big results.
These quick morning rituals did something no agenda item ever could. They gave people a low-stakes reason to laugh together, discover surprising things about their coworkers, and show up to the day already warmed up. By the time the real summit work started, the room wasn't a collection of remote colleagues flying in from different time zones. It was a team.
The live dashboard covered categories spanning Food, Travel, Media, Hobbies, Family, Weekends, and Seasons — and watching the results populate in real time turned a fun survey into a genuine mini event.
Here's a detail most people never noticed: the surveys were pre-scheduled to land in each player's Slack at 8:00 a.m. their local time — not Chicago time, not wherever I happened to be. Their time. Because starting your morning with a fun little puzzle should feel like a gift, not an interruption.
My first game design director told me something I've never forgotten:
"Your game can die by one fell swoop. Or 1,000 tiny cuts."
Every small unconsidered edge — a survey that arrives at 6 a.m. when you're still asleep, or 11 a.m. when the moment has passed — is a tiny cut the player feels without ever knowing why. My job is to find every one of those edges and sand them smooth before anyone gets there.
The best review I ever received didn't come in a performance evaluation.
It came as a meme. After one particularly diabolical food bracket question, a teammate posted the classic "two buttons" meme to our Slack channel. It was captioned "FILLING OUT BILL'S SURVEY." She wrote: "literally me."
That's the goal. That's always been the goal.
Make it so fun they can't help but play.