team-workflow

owl-listener/designer-skills

Design your team's operating rhythm—task management, rituals, and collaboration tooling.

What is team-workflow?

This skill helps you structure a design team's day-to-day cadence by defining task management practices, collaboration rituals, communication norms, and tooling. Use it when your team needs clearer workflows, better handoffs, or more effective collaboration patterns.

Define task management systems (boards, tickets, sprints, priority levels, capacity planning)
Establish collaboration rituals (standups, design critiques, reviews, retrospectives, show-and-tells)
Set communication norms (sync vs async, response times, feedback requests, decision-sharing)
Map tooling stack (design, prototyping, project management, communication, documentation, version control)
Design design-development collaboration (sprint ceremonies, handoff timing, design QA, component library)
Structure workflow stages (discovery, exploration, refinement, handoff, QA, iteration)

How to install team-workflow

npx skills add https://github.com/owl-listener/designer-skills --skill team-workflow

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How to use team-workflow

1.Assess your team's current workflow gaps (task tracking, rituals, communication, tooling)
2.Define task management: choose a board system, set status definitions, establish priority and capacity rules
3.Establish collaboration rituals: schedule standups, design critiques, reviews, and retrospectives with cadence and format
4.Document communication norms: specify sync vs async channels, response times, and feedback request protocols
5.Map your tooling stack: list design, project management, communication, and documentation tools in use
6.Design design-development collaboration: define sprint ceremony participation, handoff process, and QA gates
7.Document the workflow visibly (Notion, Confluence, or wiki) and review quarterly

Use cases

Good for

A design team starting from scratch needs to establish daily standups, weekly critiques, and a task board
A team with scattered communication wants to define when to use Slack vs scheduled syncs and response expectations
Designers and developers have unclear handoff processes; you design a QA gate and shared component library workflow
A team runs monthly sprints but lacks retrospectives; you add process improvement rituals
A team uses multiple tools (Figma, Jira, Slack, Notion) and needs a documented stack and integration points

Who it's for

Design team leads and managers
Design operations professionals
Scrum masters or agile coaches working with design teams
Design directors setting team standards
Teams transitioning to new collaboration models

team-workflow FAQ

Should we use daily standups or async updates?

Daily standups work for co-located or highly collaborative teams; async standups (Slack threads, Loom videos) suit distributed teams or deep-work cultures. Choose based on your team's timezone spread and work style, then revisit in retrospectives.

How often should we do design critiques?

Weekly is a common cadence for active design teams. Adjust based on project velocity—more frequent during exploration phases, less during refinement. The goal is timely feedback without meeting fatigue.

What's the difference between design review and design critique?

Design critique is informal, peer-to-peer feedback on work-in-progress. Design review is a formal quality gate (often with stakeholders) before handoff or launch. Both are valuable at different stages.

How do we prevent design-development handoff delays?

Define handoff timing upfront (e.g., designs ready 2 sprints ahead), use a shared component library, include developers in design reviews, and establish a design QA process to catch issues early.

Should we document everything in the workflow?

Document the essentials: task status definitions, ritual cadences and formats, communication channel guidelines, and tooling stack. Keep it visible and update it quarterly based on retrospective feedback.

Full instructions (SKILL.md)

Source of truth, from owl-listener/designer-skills.