Examples of Design Team Management

As our UX team (five designers, five front-end developers) scaled to support more feature teams, it became unclear who was working on what. Design requests were either skipped and brought up last minute or came with vague asks like, "What's your bandwidth?" To address this, I created a sprint-based assignment spreadsheet to clarify workloads and facilitate planning.

I asked Product Management to share desired work and high-level ideas before each sprint, enabling the director of front-end development and me to assign story point estimates. By summing story points and assessing capacity (accounting for PTO or other factors), we determined what fit above the "waterline" and allowed PMs to adjust priorities as needed. The spreadsheet streamlined resource allocation, balancing story points across team members and integrating design and front-end work. The example below is from 2022.