UX Process & Project Planning

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This base gives you an inside look at how Expedia’s Flights UX team is using Airtable to organize and automate tracking of projects, tasks, sprints, and workload capacity. All information is redacted and fictionalized for the purposes of this template.

To customize this base to your needs, please view the full base description 👉

Base features:

  • Advanced project & task management
  • Dynamic sprint metrics & planning
  • Deep linking between team members, projects, tasks, & sprints
  • Overall & per sprint Block dashboards powered by filtered views
  • Capacity planning (overall & per sprint)
  • Story pointing process
  • Project alignment to epics & workstreams
  • Change request log
  • Project calendar
  • Pre-built backlog & change request forms
  • Design review facilitation
  • Personal views for projects, tasks, and dashboards
  • Designed to scale yearly with easy-to-follow instructions

Process:

All projects originate as backlog items in the Projects table. They are inputted by UX team members directly, or by external stakeholders via the Project Submission form. Each project is assigned a unique identifier and tagged with all appropriate team members, workstreams, epics, sprints, etc.

After a job story and acceptance criteria have been defined, projects are prioritized and pointed as a team using our custom 6-tier pointing system. Projects should be completable within the sprint period (in our case, 2 weeks). Any time required for post-UX teamwork (i.e. dev or A/B testing) is not included in that estimate but should be tracked via the Project Status field.

Projects move from Backlog to In Progress, and tagged with the appropriate sprint from the Sprints table, in our bi-weekly grooming sessions. We estimate workload capacity using the Capacity Planning table/dashboards, along with average completion stats in the Sprints table. Our team runs on 2-week sprints, but this base can be configured to fit any sprint cadence.

Once a project moves to In Progress, team members use the Tasks table to track the micro-items required to complete a project. It is recommended that tasks be assigned to one team member. Each task is tagged with a unique identifier, project, priority, estimated start/end dates, and task dependencies. Team members can create private views within the Tasks table to use as their personal to-do list and reference the Tasks Blocks dashboard to view timelines and charts.

Other features

  • We use the Design Review table to facilitate our weekly review meetings. Team members can add projects prior, so other members can review working files and documentation before the meeting starts. This is a great source-of-truth for project feedback.
  • The Change Request table is used by team members who have something they would like to add or change in the Airtable base. New requests can be added directly, or via the Change Request Form. We then vote on whether the request should be approved, rejected, or added to the backlog.
  • Most tables and fields in this base have descriptions telling you their purpose, instructions, and any helpful tips 💡. Just hover/click on the ℹ️icon next to the table/field name.
  • We are using Zapier to push custom Airtable notifications to our team Slack channel. This is extremely useful for highlighting micro-events that otherwise go unnoticed in the base (i.e when a project status changes to Complete 🎉). Learn more about Zapier → Airtable integrations at https://zapier.com/apps/airtable/integrations.

Thank you for checking out our base. Come work with us: expedia.com/jobs.

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Updated May 12, 2020 at 9:04 PM
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Expedia Flights

Bringing the world within reach. Come work with us: expedia.com/jobs
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