August 2, 2023

Consensus-building exercises for large teams

Design system work often means working with multiple teams, and working with multiple teams means coming to some agreement about what to prioritize.

I’ve found two tools that are helpful for getting a team to decide together what to prioritize. I’ll start with the simpler technique today, then share a more complex example for larger teams tomorrow.

This first is sometimes called the Eisenhower box since it was popularized by the famously productive former US President. It’s a matrix with 4 quadrants: “Do Now” in the upper left, “Do Later” in the upper right, “Delegate” in the lower right, and “Don’t Do” in the lower right.

The chart is fairly self explanatory, but its meant to help you or your team quickly decide what task needs to be done now, done later, delegate to someone else or another team, and what can be scrapped altogether. A bit overly simple, but a good place to start if you’re new to project planning.

Here’s a tip for using this matrix with a complex project. Assign each task a rank from 1-10: level of effort and overall value (business, user, etc.) Use that rank as the vertical and horizontal axis for the chart, where low effort/high value tasks are in the top left and high effort/low value tasks are in the bottom right.

Someone shared this technique with me while I was in the middle of a huge multi-site migration, and it helped give me a clear path forward when I was nearly paralyzed by the overwhelming list of tasks to be done.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about WSJF—ing. A terrible name, but a fairly useful tool for building consensus.

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Cheers,

Up Next: Terrible name… useful way to prioritize

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