As the design lead supporting multiple enterprise initiatives, I recognized that our intake process had become fragmented. Design requests were arriving through emails, meetings, instant messages, and informal conversations, making it difficult to understand the true volume of work, prioritize requests consistently, or communicate team capacity to leadership.

To solve this, I designed and implemented a centralized design operations workflow using Confluence and Jira. I created a standardized intake form that captured the information needed to evaluate each request and automatically routed submissions to our Kanban board. I also developed a shared request library that gave stakeholders visibility into the status of their requests and where they stood in the design queue. This replaced scattered email requests with a transparent, standardized process — allowing stakeholders to submit requests and track their place in the queue, while giving leadership real-time insight into team capacity, priorities, and workload.

To further support this transparency, I created the MSXD Playbook — a centralized resource documenting everything our XD team was working on and how we worked. This included our design methodology and design thinking process, along with direct links to WCAG accessibility guidelines and brand standards. Consolidating this information into a single source of truth gave business partners and leadership an easy way to understand our process and reference standards without having to track down separate resources, ensuring our work consistently aligned with accessibility and brand requirements.

Together, this new process and playbook created transparency for both the design team and business partners, improved prioritization, reduced administrative overhead, and gave leadership a clear view of active initiatives, team capacity, and delivery timelines. More importantly, it established a scalable design operations framework that enabled the team to manage growing demand while fostering stronger collaboration and more predictable delivery across Product, Engineering, and Design.