Wow, what a response. Thank you for you effort you put into your response.

Let me try to answer some of your questions:

1. What are you going to do at the next review meeting with teams (non-UX) from other business units? I doubt they stop throwing blaming balls against your head.

First, we don’t do and have never done blaming or ranting when we discuss design at XING. Also, we don’t make decisions or give approval to move on in a critique. Other than a design review meeting, the core intention of the design critique meeting is good efficient actionable feedback, helping the designer to iterate. If there is new actionable feedback on another meeting or insights gathered on research, we welcome it to keep iterating.

2. How long does it take for 1 topic (or 1 feature) to be accomplished according to your “Definition of Done”?

Not sure if I got your question right. Design Critique, from my personal point of view, has nothing to do with a “definition of done”. It’s about analyzing design work towards objectives from business and users needs. It’s a total different process and there are many more factors involved to define, when a feature is done or ready to ship.

3. What do XING-UX-fellows specifically learn from design critique meetings?

Good question. I could write another post about this. Everybody in a critique is actually learning something. The designer who is presenting is obviously learning about strength and weaknesses of his design. Critics are also learning a lot, because different points of view come together and even facilitators learn new skills in design critiques. And over the long term we’re improving on skills like design practice, communication, giving good feedback, moderating and many more. Nothing you can’t learn in other ways, but it’s happening and welcomed by our team.