Work time division — Multiple contexts at the same time

Project management/Image source

In the middle of 2021 and until the end of 2022, I was faced with a major challenge: taking care of one of the largest products of one of the biggest players in the hosting market in Brazil.

But that wasn’t the only challenge for me. Imagine a newcomer to the company, having just left a startup where I worked in an "only me team". The other challenge was dealing with two teams in parallel and with two backlogs, Azure boards, running sprints, and OKRs.

So, I tried to organize myself in the best possible way, and with the help of my manager at the time (Will, if you read this article, you are an awesome leader!) I found and created some “hacks” that I still use today, which helped me reduce anxiety during day-to-day work.

Now I’m going to mention some of these discoveries and exemplify how they brought me more tranquility in negotiating deadlines with clients and delivering high-quality tasks.

1. Creating a list with all the tasks you have to deliver within a certain deadline

Start with the basics! A list of tasks and deliverables.

If you don’t have a well-defined process, don’t follow sprints, and don’t have structured deadlines, then you should definitely write down everything you have to deliver in the week, fortnight, and month.

Believe me, this will even help you in quarterly, biannual, and annual evaluations with management.

By the way, when you get to the end of the month and see how much you’ve done, trust me… It will be worth it!

For example, Notion can be used to organize the tasks. In this print, the Week #1 tasks are listed before I think about all the tasks I have to do in my design process (during 6 months + for example).

2. Aligning with your peers and managers (PO, PM, BA, Lead) what are the priority tasks

Now that you’ve gathered all the tasks for this period set by you, let’s think about priorities:

• Are your tasks aligned with the pain points, research results, management reports, and user metric analysis you’ve done?
• What do you need to deliver first that will generate more value for the user and the business is on this list?
• Is there a problem with the user that you need to pay attention to, and that you can fix with one of your listed tasks? (Put out any urgent fires, for example?)

If the answers to these questions above are yes, then you are well aligned with your peers.

But if you still don’t understand your priorities, on one side or the other (since you may be working in 1+ squads, for example), I recommend scheduling weekly meetings of up to 30 minutes to align:

• Business goals (where do we want to go with this functionality/product, who are the people we are targeting)
• Pain points (friction points in the flow, problems reported by users, major support-related contact reasons related to the platform/feature)

Always remember to write down these points, adding them to a board, canvas, Notion, or even a notepad (paper works too!).

In the second part, we can use tags to separate the tasks by priority, like the example above using tables in Notion.

In another visualization, “By type” we have very specific separated tasks by Squads.

3. Updating the status of these prioritized tasks and leaving some space for unexpected tasks

Everything organized and aligned with stakeholders? Monitoring must be continuous!

We have to present our results in bi-weekly meetings, attend meetings with end-users and transcribe what they said, and all of this needs to be reported to our peers, squad colleagues in the form of insights at the end of a discovery, for example.

Always adding a deadline and keeping the status of your task updated, is good for everyone involved, as it brings visibility on how you handled with that part of the design process.

Everyone who have access and reads that document, have to be able to understand clearly what you did, and for example, your manager can assist you, giving you tips and guiding you in a critical point that you have some doubts.

Deadline property selected in the “Costumer Journey Map” example.

3.1. Now, one last point: the dreaded unexpected tasks

Always leave room for them, because they will arise.

A layout correction, feedback from a user who came straight from the support team, or even help you need to give to a colleague in another squad.

Understand: the design process is not linear (a super cliché phrase, but real) and it is very collaborative. Repeat the process from the beginning and prioritize this unexpected task in your task list with the help of your peers.

Deadline property selected in the unexpected task, the task is already prioritized.

Don’t forget: ask for help and feedback. Know that everyone can create their own organization processes according to the company they work for and their work environment.

If I helped you, feel free to message me on LinkedIn to chat about design or any other subject you find interesting! 👍

References: https://testimonial.to/ux-playbook