Managing design work goes beyond pushing pixels—it requires balancing workloads, creating a shared design culture, and supporting designers at every stage. This page highlights how I’ve led UX teams by making sprint planning more equitable and impactful, and by creating space for thoughtful design critique that strengthened both the work and the team.
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.
As our design team grew and became embedded in more feature teams, we risked losing visibility into each other’s work. To maintain a cohesive platform experience, I initiated a weekly design critique forum to share work in progress, surface inconsistencies before they went to production, and strengthen our shared design language.
These sessions kept us aligned on platform capabilities, emerging patterns, and terminology, while also giving the team space to practice giving and receiving constructive feedback.
The format evolved over time—from a Trello board to a lightweight Slack list shown here—adapting to what made participation easiest.