As a Design System, it is vital to be organized in bookkeeping and housekeeping. Our tools around keeping the team’s work organized include Figjam, Jira, Wiki and Bitbucket.
tl;dr
Over-communicate to the Community on your Releases and Roadmap using Jira.
It’s good for ya! 😉
Spotlight: Jira
We have a standard Jira project, set by corporate. This means not all-admin privileges, rather, project level admin rights.
I love bookkeeping tools. Github is everyone’s favorite. However, I’ve been using Jira for a long time to organize the work.
My philosophy is to push the tools you already have to the max.
So, over the years my natural curiosity has helped me explore many of the Jira features.
Jira Releases
I’ve been using this over the years during our years of evolution, when we were mostly just dev team members with 1 design lead.
However, fast forward to now with a fully-suited Design System team with Design, Content Design, A11y, Research and Design Ops to complement our Engineering team, Jira Releases feature is highly favored and leaned into.
Jira Roadmap
More recently, with the help of my peer the creative Director and our Program Manager, we’ve been taking it to the next level on project status with the gantt chart views.
We tried all kinds of permutations in tracking component design and development progress. We landed on organizing per component / work item / tech. For example, button - dev - flutter.
It is very informative and helps us organize and communicate the progress. If you are into Dashboards, try this as well!
We do use all of it!
The feedback we’ve received on both, from the community has been very positive. I am planning to keep bringing this front and center to the Community, to make it second nature in reference for them.
Builds trust and awareness. They will continue spreading the word!
The age of open roadmaps is here!