Glasswing Studio is 46 designers, researchers and producers working out of a brick building in Portland’s Central Eastside and, increasingly, out of their own homes in Tucson, Minneapolis and Brooklyn. They design apps for clients who are mostly not in Portland either.
Critique that disappeared
A studio runs on critique. At Glasswing that used to mean a video call: a designer shares a screen, four people react, someone takes notes, and the notes end up in a doc that nobody opens again. “We would make the same call on a button twice in a month,” says Priya Raman, who runs operations. “And when a client asked why the onboarding changed, the honest answer was that it came up on a Thursday.”
Revision rounds had crept up. So had the number of calls on everyone’s calendar.
A page per project, a thread per question
Glasswing moved its project wiki into Quill in the summer of 2025. Each client project has a page; every open design question is a discussion on that page, with a close date. Designers post the screens, reviewers answer when they are online, and the lead designer writes the decision when the thread closes.
- Clients are invited as guests and can read and comment on the project page, at no cost.
- The decision log for each project doubles as the change record at sign-off.
- Critique calls still happen, but only for questions a thread could not settle.
Clients in the loop, not on the call
The surprise was the clients. Two out of three now read their project’s decision log every week, without being asked. “They stopped asking us to walk them through the changes,” Priya says. “The walk-through is already written, with the reasons.”
Writing the decision down took thirty seconds. Not writing it down used to cost us a meeting a week.
A year on
Revision rounds per project are down 37%. The studio’s last design system went from kickoff to sign-off in nine working days, against 23 for the one before it. Priya credits one small habit for most of it: nobody closes a critique without typing the decision, even when the decision is “leave it as it is.”
