Every Team Ritual Has an Expiration Date

I was at BWOYL, the first Best Work of Your Life event, at GitHub HQ last week. John Maeda hosted a panel with Setor Zilevu, Quirine van Walt Meijer, and Paul Bakaus, and the whole session was built around one question: what actually enables someone to do their best work, and what quietly denies it.

For me, transitioning into operations gave me the room to do the best work of my life. So the panel’s question stuck with me in a specific direction: what can we do to give our team that same environment, the conditions for their best work?

Is it challenge? Learning opportunities? New tools? All of it combined? That’s a broad, tall order. I wanted something more concrete and actionable, so I started looking at one ritual meant to hold our distributed team together. That’s when I realized something.

Every team ritual has an expiration date.

Not because it’s poorly designed, but because teams change while rituals often don’t.

Most teams, ours included, already run plenty of sub-team rituals, critique, share-outs, and so on. I’m leaving those alone. What I want to look at is the one ritual meant to hold the whole team together. I believe many teams have a ritual like this.

We’re a mid-sized, fully distributed enterprise design team. A good chunk of the team joined in just the last year or two. There’s one weekly all-team cadence, and that’s where I started.

Here’s what happened. The meeting started as a product showcase, teams demoing what they’d shipped each week. That made sense when the org was growing and people needed visibility into each other’s work. Then it started to drift. Fewer people signed up to showcase, so the slot filled in with skill-shares, tool demos, side projects, whatever people had. Attendance followed the content down. By the time I joined the team, somewhere between 20% and 50% of the team showed up on a given week, and the meeting had quietly become optional.

That drift isn’t unique to us. Once a ritual outlives the purpose it was created for, repeating the same cadence won’t restore its value. It simply preserves a habit that no longer serves the team. Our team was open to looking at this honestly, because the managers and leadership kept the focus on the actual core question: are we giving our designers the environment to do their best work?

So what changed? Time.

A couple of years ago, an hour-long weekly meeting was simply part of the job, and making it mandatory made sense. The meeting didn’t suddenly become worse. That same hour simply became much more expensive. It now competes with AI-assisted shipping, constant context switching, asynchronous collaboration, and shrinking attention. The opportunity cost of attending became much higher.

Recent research from Lenny Rachitsky and Noam Segal found burnout increased 11 percentage points in a year. Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett have been circling the same thing from the design leadership side. Their recent Finding Our Way conversations describe a version of “more work, same pay” showing up across the industry.

Team time has become more valuable than ever. Which means every recurring meeting has to justify its existence. Team rituals have expiration dates.

Even rituals that feel timeless, like design critique, have an expiration date. Usually it’s not the practice that expires. It’s the format, the cadence, or the audience.

A ritual nearing its expiration date isn’t hard to spot, once you know where to look.

- The content quietly drifting from its original intent

- People opting in only when there’s a personal ask

- A growing gap between who’s on the invite and who actually shows up

- People present in the meeting but not in it, no real participation

- The organizer struggling to get anyone to contribute meaningful content

The harder part is what comes next: fixing it.

Once these signs start to appear, it’s time for the team to revisit the ritual. But the change should be intentional. Fixing it isn’t a solo call. It works best as a small group, leadership, team leads, and whoever’s genuinely enthusiastic enough to own the redesign.

Good intentions still need to run through a real process.

• Identify what the ritual was originally meant to accomplish.

• Decide what the team needs now, get leadership support.

• Redesign the format, cadence, or audience.

• Stabilize the new state, reinforce the new rhythm and keep evaluating it.

Each phase has its own steps, but low-stakes changes move through them quickly, and smaller teams adjust faster too. Ours moves fast enough that we ran the whole cycle in about a week.

Once the new cadence or content is decided, communicate it to the team, clearly and more than once. Over-communicating here builds trust. A few things worth covering:

• What stays

• What’s changing, and why

• How it’s changing, and the timeframe

• How people can give feedback

Once it rolls out, keep watching it and keep the conversation open to maintain engagement. It’ll run its course again eventually. That’s fine. Keep iterating.

For our team, we kept the cadence and changed the format and content instead, a four-week rotation focused on learning, alignment and culture, product share-outs, and creative time. We’re still watching to see how the new rhythm holds up.

Team rituals are one of the few moments where culture becomes visible. It is a place where people learn what’s important, reconnect to the bigger picture, giving feedback, celebrate progress, and build relateionships. Every ritual eventually reaches the point where it no longer serves the purpose it was designed for. it’s rarely just the meeting that’s suffering. It’s often an early signal that the team’s operating environment has changed.

The job of operations isn’t to blindly preserve rituals. It’s to continually iterate and redesign them so the time people spend together remains worth spending.

I’m building a practical tool to help teams redesign that cadence, because I suspect many teams are experiencing the same thing.

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