Design roadmaps

Question

Do you have a design roadmap in your team outlining on which themes/projects/objectives you plan to work on for the next couple of months? If yes, how does it work for you? Do you see any shortcomings? Are you using any tool for that? Can you recommend it?

(I tried to use Productboard for that filtering by 'designer' fields, but it doesn't serve it's purpose too well, as 1. it's showing tasks we're not highly involved in anymore, 2. we have to assign someone specific for each future task. Anyway, that's rather a technicality, and I'm also interested in the high-level answers.)

Answer 1

It is possible to have a design roadmap that shows the design tasks in a chronological order which allows people like managers to allocate resources or plan the work to be assigned to team members. However, I don't often see this done or shared within a wider audience if it is just a design roadmap because a feature or product release roadmap is usually what is communicated and presented for everyone in the product team.

And then based on this high level roadmap, teams responsible for each aspect of the product design and delivery process (from research, design, build, test, go-live) would plan their resources and activities accordingly.

There are many tools like Microsoft Planner, Trello and any number of workflow or task-based products that would work well for this.