Design Work Prioritization

How might we invest on areas where designers can have the greatest impact on the product?

Situation

When I first started managing a team at VMware, changes to the roadmap and designer attrition left the teams with multiple tracks of work and unsure about what should be prioritized. Furthermore, cross-functional teams were complaining that they were blocked on design.

My task was to figure out where to invest design power, so that we could maximize our impact in the user experience for the product.

Identify Gaps

Came up with a strategy to help design and product leads decide on work that needed to be prioritized for design and identify the gaps from what was being worked on and the high level roadmap.

Strategy

Worked with design leadership to come up with criteria, numbers and metrics to score points, and put a team together to interview product leads.

Evaluate Work With Product Owners and Leadership

Interviewed PMs first and asked them to list the current projects in the roadmap and how they mapped to the main company priorities. Then asked them to score 2-3 of their main priorities in different categories. Next, we interviewed the Product leaders for their feedback on prioritization.
Within Design leadership, we also scored other current design initiatives

Allocate Designers to Projects

I created a quick board that showed what designers were working on, plus the level of effort those projects required, and how those differed from the projects that should be prioritized. This helped facilitate the conversation to help us, the design leadership, make decisions for designer allocation of work.

Results

Sorted projects in a timeline that would prioritize those that aligned with the company goals instead of having to drop any projects.
Planned design work for the next two quarters.
Opened up opportunities for designers to go beyond their circle of influence.
Opened up communication with PMs and engineering leadership. Now they could know which designer owned each project, and there was a design Jira ticket attached to every major product Jira ticket.
Ensured that design was invested on projects that influenced company goals directly.