Design Team's Process Starter Pack

In an ideal world: You're leading an exciting project that's rapidly progressing, growing, and flourishing financially. This means one thing: you can expand your team! And there it is – the first dream candidate, and maybe the second, and the third.

It's time to establish a workflow that keeps colleagues on the same page, enhancing their designs, enabling task distribution without confusion, and preventing redundant work.

Product managers need to set tasks and understand the workflow of the design team, enabling more effective communication. A similar approach applies to developers – these relationships require significant investment and careful nurturing for optimal results.

If the interaction process between your team and adjacent departments is defined and operational, the outcome will be as anticipated. The client will receive precisely the product they were expecting. Below, I'll outline three fundamental principles that will make your team's work more seamless and productive.

Enhance Communication

📌 Make it a rule to thoroughly discuss tasks before diving into them. Evaluate timelines together and collaborate during task grooming, even if each designer is responsible for their own part of the product – immerse yourselves in the ongoing process.

📌 Whenever you close a task, conduct a design check among designers: before finalizing the layout with external teams, discuss it amongst designers; your colleagues are likely to have questions or comments.

This stage is not about criticism but about a fresh and new perspective.

Verified: the more often you showcase your work to other designers, the higher the quality of the outcome.

📌 Coordinate with development and product teams on the "Design review" process: the final outcome of your work will depend on this. Agree that the layout you pass to development might not always remain the same by the end.

Conduct reviews at the final stage of development or, at worst, during testing. The sooner you spot inconsistencies with the design, the more likely it is that changes can be incorporated in the same release.

Keep in mind that your comments might go unnoticed at times – it's normal. The team won't make adjustments if they aren't critical for the business. It's important to keep track of the layouts even after they've gone into development.

Think ahead and independently manage development tasks: on the board and during daily syncs. Through a well-established communication process with developers, you'll not only receive accurately implemented designs in production but also learn about design from a technical standpoint in parallel.

Create a Shared Board

If there's more than one designer in your team: I highly recommend not delaying and creating a shared board (Trello / Notion / Jira or the tracker used in your company). It's beneficial for everyone: both designers and anyone involved in production. Designers will have a visual of the current and upcoming task pool, while product and development teams can observe the process in real time without distracting you from your work.

📌 Some key status labels I favor, which should be understandable to everyone:

1. Backlog: This folder is where you can place tasks without specific deadlines. Sometimes it might be empty, and that's okay. The product team might not have had time to describe numerous tasks. It's also possible that a manager has added all possible tasks for the project – these should also go into the backlog, awaiting their turn.

   
   

2. Sprint Tasks (To Do): Most likely, in your small design team, you'll be working in sprints. This way, you can allocate a set of tasks for one to two weeks and work specifically on them. Your colleagues can then visibly see the results.

   
   

3. In Progress: Tasks you are currently working on. I recommend having no more than one task in this column. If priorities shift, replace the task on the board with the updated one, and avoid spreading yourself thin.

   
   

Experience shows that if you aim to do everything all at once, you'll end up spending significantly more time and energy as you switch from one task to another. Trying to maintain focus on several tasks simultaneously is simply unrealistic: your concentration will wane, slowing down your progress. Conserve your resources and take on no more than one task at a time.

4. Approval (Check): The name of this status speaks for itself. Include design checks with both the team, development, and the product team here. Share the concept you've developed with colleagues during the early stages of creating layouts – the sooner, the better. Be prepared to promptly make changes and provide comments, answer questions, and offer feedback.

   
   

I recommend attending the meeting (or being available in a chat) for the final layout approval. If any mistakes or deficiencies are identified, you should be the first to know. Your design is your responsibility.

5. Done: This is where the finalized and approved layout will reside. Move the task to this status only after it has been approved by the product team.

Congratulations, you're doing great! 🎉🎉🎉

Avoid excessive status categories – the fewer, the better. I work with my team using the five-block system, but if you manage to condense the process for your project, that's fantastic. Ultimately, it's important that each designer by themselves progresses each task through the statuses consciously, while colleagues can see tasks in real-time progress. This way, you'll streamline the work process and make it more transparent for external teams.

Make your Figma project convenient

Only the most patient and organized among us can boast a Figma setup with structured files, labeled frames, and components. More often than not, a designer's workspace consists of many pages of layouts.

Yes, when you work alone, you can easily navigate your "creative chaos" and know what's where: why one version of a feature is pinned here and another has moved to a different page.

However, once your team expands beyond one designer, it's time to organize your Figma files for everyone's ease of use. And I'm not just talking about the design team: Figma can help your colleagues from external teams orient themselves within the product, its sections, and iterations.

So, here's a solution you can start implementing today and gradually make it a routine process for the future.

Create a space in Figma to store the current and production-ready state of your product – a master page. This is where everything will be kept: new and old layouts, screenshots if no layouts remain. The main criterion is that the design will match what's in production.

The master page will be useful for both the product team – they can assess the current status of the product to create tasks – and developers – to align with the coding process. I recommend allocating a day in the sprint for refining this page.

Imagine that you've brought a new designer onto the team, and you need to quickly get them up to speed, introduce them to the project's structure. The product map should be clear and comprehensible. In the future, this page will also serve as a quick tour of the product.

When got a task:

• Open New page or Section
• As soon as you receive a task, copy the task description and create a mini description card close to layouts
• Once layouts are ready, copy the page or section link and add it to the task description on the board
• After the task has rightfully achieved the "Done" status, avoid altering that page in Figma so that the link remains in the task for historical purposes
• Transfer the layouts to the master page as soon as the task is in production.

By following this approach, the master page will always stay current, and each task will be preserved as an individual entity. Additionally, you can update your knowledge about the product and trace its development throughout the project.

📌 In the end, you will have a file with the main page featuring the master layout, which reflects the product, and individual pages or sections for each feature/task.

When the space in the file runs out, archive it and continue creating tasks in a new one. And if the product becomes significantly larger, consider creating several master files based on different product sections.

🤓 Feel free to share in the comments what cool processes you consider essential for working with a design team, and which ones specifically work in your team. I'm sure we can make our work even more comfortable.