Design Project Manager’s Day-to-Day Tools
Recently I’ve been updating my job title into Facebook and bumped into suggested PM title: “Design manager”. I did a quick check, there are plenty of differences between the Desing manager and PM having nothing to do with design per se. Anyways, this made me wonder about the simpler day-to-day difference between working as a PM in the development company and design agency.
While there are endless differences and similarities in the management of design and development teams, the focus of this note is simply a day-to-day tool and brief feedback about transitions.
Communication
Development — Skype
When I was a QA Lead and Scrum master for a dedicated team, we found ourselves using Skype daily. Obviously, not the best choice by any means. It was slow and unreliable, up to this day a have a bug where I can’t pick up the call from the laptop if my phone also rings. On top of that, top management used “Skype for business”, so we launched one more app each time to contact PO, HR or CEO.
However, Skype is good at several things and keep those in focus. There are no fancy bots, reminders or integrations and connection seems more reliable that Google Meet or Slack. Slack doesn’t try to be something on top of being a solid communication tool, and I still feel nostalgic about it.
Design — Slack
While Slack is basically is the standard for both dev and design teams now, it was a fresh product when I joined Hexagon. It a clearly much better text-based chat experience. For example, threads are great for keeping channels clean and structured. Instead of piling up 3 screens with messages to discuss this new logo concept, we keep our answers under the request for a review.
But still, I often hear people complaining about Slack for being a great way to dump your valuable information in endless chats and threads. Search, files, bots, workflows are nice, but someone should introduce and maintain them, design roles to be sure that information can be found. It takes valuable time you can spend with the team in favor of maintenance.
Probably, it’s one of the reasons built a critical attitude about products that try to be too much of themselves. Slack pushes so hard for additional features (search for files, links, bots, etc), that its prime function starts to blur out.
Slack’s stock prices suggest that I’m wrong, but any messenger-like tool isn’t meant to store or process information. The message is here now and then it’s gone and it’s okay.
Documentation
Development — Confluence
I’ve been at one of product management meetups where one of the leading Atlassian partners said: “We all how Jira is slow as f*ck” and this sums up the Confluence experience as well.
Overall, I was very happy with Confluence working as a part of a dedicated team, there was no reason to complain as I rarely opened 10 pages a day. It was my cozy space to update feature documentation, troubleshooting articles, and how-to. When I landed at the design agency with 5+ projects running simultaneously it came to my realization that I waste a substantial chunk of my day waiting for Confluence to catch up with me clicking looking up the last follow-up or requirement.
There are nice templates for everything, but it’s heavy and aesthetically unpleasant mess designers don’t find useful.
Design — Notion
Notion is the best thing I discovered so far. It’s clear and fast, the selection of templates shared by the community is even bigger than what Atlassian can offer. It’s perfect to dynamically update and look up the information.
For example, we made a custom template for the project updates. Instead of writing endless how-to articles on how this should be maintained I simply outlined 4 principles.
- Documentation is attached to the Project Stages
- Documentation is organized in the form of Follow-ups
- Timeline organization — updates are stored as threads/timelines, so each change is tracked
- Labeling — each update can be labeled as a tag (ex. new info, edit, iteration)
We designed the template for our needs and can now publish alongside other templates notion community created.
Task tracking
Development — Microsoft Team Foundation Server 🤯
Actually, TFS was pretty good, but I have to be honest — I was not a hardcore user. It was just one of the tools form Microsoft’s suite that we used back then. I hope someone can point out the issues with TFS, but card design is pretty conventional, the swimming lanes were great for tricky project planning.
Design — Jira
If it seems that I was determined to brag about Atlassian Suite, then I have to disappoint you. Jira is my favorite tracking tool up to date. Project templates are exactly what I need to keep the project organized and healthy. It’s an industry standard for task tracking, so it’s simple to add a client or developer to your board without any learning curve.
Apart from that, the amount of data it collects allows me to craft a spreadsheet out of my own interest or to support data-based decision making at Hexagon.
Yes, there is a lot of problems with consistency, it’s hard to get used to, and it’s notoriously slow. Why have different fields in the same exact card? To confuse users, I guess.
Conclusions
Overall, I found that the speed and fluency of tools I rely on became more important for me. Both Slack and Notion are much more responsive tools that Skype and Confluence, but I can’t see how Jira can be fully substituted at the moment. The notion has some great task tracking templates, but it’s far from the sophisticated tracked Jira is.
P.S.
Also, it’s much more fun to work for a design agency 😊
