Rethinking Communication

Insights from Discord’s Loom Video Strategy

Photo by Chris Galbraith on Unsplash

Welcome to this week’s edition of Design Thinking for All! It’s been a crazy and fantastic week. Last Friday, we hosted our spring summit, Independent Voices : Creative Collisions, Creating New Value. It was all about new ideas, new insights, and bringing individuals together — and it was a blast! We’re looking forward to the next one in the fall.

As a result I’ve been thinking a lot about how we intake information and new ideas. How we process it, let it marinate, and what we do next.

I was taking a walk and listening to a podcast when similar topics came up. The podcast was an interview between Nilay Patel of The Verge and Discord CEO Jason Citron. I encourage you to listen to the whole thing, but one specific thing caught my attention —

28 minutes in, Patel and Citron talk about how Discord is organized and how they do their work. Citron shares that they use Loom videos to communicate, collaborate and as an alternative to meetings.

For example, they will record a 10-minute Loom video presenting their deck and highlighting their key points before they schedule a meeting on the topic. People are then able to watch it on their own time, when, where and how they…