What project do you work on?
I work on our design system and visual design language for product.
What is your role?
I’m a visual designer.
How big is the product team?
Can’t tell how big the product team is. If you include everyone that doesn’t include sales, marketing and IT, then maybe 2000 people?
What’s the makeup of your team?
Back end engineers, UI engineers, program managers, product managers, designers, content developers (really technical writers), some testers.
What’s your process like for going from the idea for a small improvement (not a large task) to it going live in production?
Propose it to design team, create a Jira and assign to the UI dev lead.
How much (if any) paperwork/bureaucracy is there involved with releasing a new feature/bug?
Depends on the size. Little to none for small improvements, quite large for bigger features.
Tell me about your process for planning work in, do you use sprints? Does it work well for your team?
There is no process for planning work on the design team. I don’t think this works well at all as their is a clear disconnect between what we propose in design and what gets released.
We have discussed it recently. We were in production mode for months just cranking things out. Almost like working in the kitchen of a restaurant or something. But we finally got a breather and have started a design ops process. Then we’ll see how it works out with the dev process as a whole.
Do you plan testing upfront or chat to testers about it once the dev work is done? And do you take the testing work into consideration when planning what to bring in?
We rarely test. Even when we do, it doesn’t inform the final product. We have gone with features that tested poorly.
What’s the biggest annoyances you’ve had around getting stuff done, planning, working together as a team, or that kind of thing?
The biggest annoyance is that every small team has the power to derail consistency and a good experience. One team—sometimes even one individual—can decide to do something completely different, go off on their own, and there’s no accountability.
Which (if any) tools do you help to keep track of work?
I use JIRA, Google Task and Google sheets. But there is no standard.