UX PlayBook & Asana

What is the UX Playbook?

The UX Playbook is a tool to guide discussions about right-sizing the approach to design discovery work.

Why is it important?

The UX playbook was born out of need to communicate with other disciplines who were new to incorporating UX work into their planning. It helps answer questions like “How do we right size our approach to design? How to align cross functionally on risks and desired outcomes for product MVPs?”

The backstory

As an organization that didn’t discreetly track UX work (only engineering items in the backlog) it became necessary to show the head of Product Management and Engineering that Design was not interested in wasting time and resources on “some big research effort” that wasn’t well understood outside of UX. As a result, this chart was made to guide cross functional planning efforts and align teams on scope of UX effort, necessary cross functional participation, and agreed upon outcomes of the effort.

Once a “right sized” approach was agreed upon, UX managers could then create a discovery plan to operationalize the effort.

Managing in Asana

To make this work viewable and shareable across the program review efforts, the timeline, once agreed upon, is added to Asana:

Design team tracking

In addition to being able to share the aligned upon work effort in program reviews, I was able to easily set up templates in Asana for UX managers to utilize as part of planning for the Dual Track Agile Process, and create an all-up view of design resource availability: