Agile, repeatable design processes
Streamlining workflows for more targeted collaboration across teams and reducing developer handoff by three weeks.
Updated design sprint schedule
Role: Design Lead
Timeline: Spring 2024
Activities: Agile process improvements, prototyping
As a small, startup-like design team of two, the cadence of our touchpoints with other teams is critical to keeping things running smoothly.
Our team recently switched from two-week sprints to three-week sprints, and our “buffer sprint” between design and development resulted in about a month delay in releasing new designs.
Thinking about what’s really needed for designs to be released, I created an updated sprint schedule for design meetings and shared it with the team.
This new sprint schedule facilitates smaller, more agile “slices” of design work, and also improved our collaboration with the development teams through more regular feedback each sprint.
User research process
Role: Design Lead
Timeline: Winter 2022
Activities: Agile process improvements, user research
Part of being a designer involves scoping tasks so that we can guide the team through the design process. I’ve found that having shared documentation that "shows" rather than "tells," is super helpful to get teammates on the same page.
Using Mural, I created an interactive user research process that shows the inputs and outputs needed for each step, with links to the needed templates and team documentation.
At the risk of sounding “waterfall-y," the inputs and outputs were really helpful in understanding where input from other teams is needed throughout the process.
We’ve followed this user research process for over three years, and we’ve also progressively added resources and documentation where needed.
Like all good documentation on a project, this can live and grow with the team’s needs.