A solid project management system gives designers more time to do impactful work. Instead of worrying about checkins and checkpoints and checkboxes, your team can spend time actually, you know, designing.
Here, we'll show you step-by-step how to build a project management system tailored specifically to designers in Notion. We've seen it work across dozens of design teams. They're using it to take cross-functional projects to completion, foster tighter feedback loops and lead to a better end product for users.
In this piece, you'll learn:
- To create a database for a project management system that saves time, increases efficiency and allows for company-wide transparency.
- To organize this database with tags and views so you can immediately find what you need.
- Best practices from the Notion design team for supreme project management.
Soon, you'll be able to create a project management system for all things design that looks like this:
Your design team needs a system
to manage its projects
From a project management standpoint, designers face a unique set of problems.
- Too many tools — it's easy to lose files, re-do work and waste time when designers need to turn over many rocks to find the one thing they need.
- Processes get inconsistent — from problem to ideation to multiple drafts, your team is devaluing their design work if steps are missed and edge cases aren't considered. This is especially critical as your team grows.
- Many voices in feedback loops — design teams work cross-functionally, and if there isn't a place to collect and act on feedback, it gets lost and other teams feel as though their opinions aren't taken into account.
In Notion, you can create a project management system that is completely customizable for your team's needs.
- All tools, project work and feedback in one place — in Notion pages, you can embed Figma and Framer prototypes, Invision designs, images, video and more. Plus, comments and discussions happen in these pages. So along with tracking project statuses, everything relevant to that project has a home, which means your team can quickly access it.
- Establish a process and track every step of a project — from simple logo development to complex overhauls of your entire design system, you can create a process that works for your team, and every project can be moved from one stage to the next with complete visibility.
- Surface only relevant information — with many steps and nuanced processes, there can be a lot of noise when managing every single aspect of a design project. Notion lets you slice the same database many different ways, so you can see projects by designer or what's launching this week (or however else you want to see it).
So, how does this help your team?