Deliver with less fuss — a Jira Software guide for Designers
Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the constant work with no way to manage and prioritize your work? Well, this is the guide for you!
A practical guide for designers to manage their work and capacity in Jira Software.
Atlassian’s Growth Design Studio has been using this method for nearly two years and has seen great results in increased design output, better communication, and improved focus time.
🟪 Epics
Use Epics to plan your quarter from a high level, allowing your team to see how work is connected holistically.
Tip: Add as much information into the epic’s description as possible. This should be your source of truth; adding this information into a single location means you don’t have to repeat it in individual tasks.
🟦 Tasks
Tasks allow you to plan the scope of work involved in each epic, giving your team a better understanding of the depth and complexity involved. Tasks are a breakdown of the design work required in each phase.
Tip: Add some high-level tasks during your planning sessions, then further refine those tasks as you gain a better understanding of the work involved.
Tip: Don’t over plan here; try to keep things light until you feel 80% to 90% sure about each project. Overplanning ends up with deleting a lot of JSW tasks… #truestory
Story points = your estimate in days
Capture the amount of effort for each task involved using story points. Instead of using the Fibonacci sequence, use “number of days”.
e.g. 1 point = 1 day of effort
This is an easy way to quantify effort and help manage capacity during sprints. Why? You can share your bandwidth more visually by using this figure to help you prioritize work with your team or design manager if over your work capacity.
Total “work capacity” is approximately 70–80% of the whole sprint.
Tip: Leave time for meetings, admin, and random things that might pop up.e.g. a bi-weekly sprint is ten days, so you should have around 7 to 8 days of work capacity.
The example below shows how JSW calculates the number of days of work in a bi-weekly sprint: “I have 5.5 days worth of work.”
Use this multiplier to effectively estimate story points:
- High confidence x 1
- Medium confidence x 1.5
- Low confidence x 2
For example, a research study with an estimate of five days at medium confidence: 5 x 1.5 = 7.5 (estimate of days effort)
🏃♂️ Running sprints
Most scrum experts recommend starting on a Wednesday, but we found starting at the beginning of the week and finishing at the end of the week connected better with our workflow. It’s really up to the teams to decide what cadence works best.
Sprint planning activity
Generally, teams host a one-hour planning session conducted asynchronously. This is to:
- Break down tasks to fit within the given sprint (e.g. weekly, bi-weekly, etc.)
- Evaluate whether unfinished tasks should go into the next sprint or move to the Backlog
- Review your capacity and priority for the following sprint(s)
- Pull tasks into the new sprint based on priority and capacity
Must do: If a task is Major or more, then work on it first. “I have to get this finished during this sprint.”
Can do: If a task is Minor or less, it doesn’t need to be completed during this sprint. “I can afford to move it to the next sprint.”
Stand-up activity
Keep stand-up meetings as straightforward as possible to reduce stress and overhead. Focus on two main questions:
- What are you working on? — use this to present a quick run-through of the work you’re doing this sprint.
- Challenges or blockers — use this to highlight any complex challenges or tasks blocking progress.
Roles and responsibilities
🙋♀️ Sprint lead — Generally this role is performed by a Design Manager or a Scrum expert. They manage the start and end of sprints, and facilitate stand-up sessions.
🙋♂️🙋♀️ Sprinters — This role is assigned to all Designers. Each sprinter agrees to use this process to manage their work and capacity, while keeping their roadmap and backlog up-to-date to ensure your team has good visibility of the present and future.
Wayfinding in Jira Software
Use these top three sidebar items to keep track of where your focus needs to be:
🥳 In summary
By working in this way, I spend more time on other areas of design. Using this process has helped to deliver consistently, on time, and without burning out.
The key element of this system is it helps communicate how long a task will take when it will be completed, and how much you can do within a given period.
Jira Software ticks all the boxes for me and helps keep me focused on the important things — being a designer!
What version of Jira Software should you use?
- Scrum template — if you need sprints to break up work and allow timeboxing of tasks. e.g. how much can I get done in two weeks?
- Team-managed version — The company-managed version is somewhat complex, and there are many settings for a lone designer to contend with. The team-managed version allows teams to get started with little setup fuss and keeps things simple.
Appendix
Illustration: https://storyset.com/
