Assigning Designers and Developers

This page outlines the steps for assigning designers and developers to projects. It covers scenarios for new site builds, showcase sites, general support and maintenance requests, and new features to existing sites.

Design queue & assigning designers

All design tasks are organized in our ███████████████, and submitted via Linear or a Linear Slack command (see below).

If you need a designer, first determine if you need to create a new request:

Submit a new request when:

A new launch project or task is starting and needs a designer;
A new top-level project phase is starting (like a Phase 2);
Our Support or Dev teams need a designer for a task;

Do not submit a new request when:

A project already has a design issue in the queue, with a designer assigned;
A project progresses through Milestones (e.g.: QA, Launch, etc.);
A project has been stalled for a long period and is starting up again. Depending on their current capacity, we may need to shift designers;

What you should do: Reach out to the designer directly (via Slack/P2)

In the event you do need to create a new issue for a project that already has a designer assigned, please assign it to the same designer to avoid confusion. The designer should also be added to the project’s members.

Check in with the design lead, internal designers (@studio-51-team), or a launch team lead if you’re unsure.

How to submit a new request

Submitting Studio 51 requests in Linear can be done in various ways. Below you’ll find the most common workflows. Please include as much detail as you can when submitting requests.

When setting up a new Launch Project:

If you have all the information related to the design request when setting up the project.

Create a new Launch project on the Project’s board;
Scroll down and change the Design issue team to Studio 51;
Fill out the request template and include as much detail as possible;
Once submitted, it will appear in our Triage queue;

Existing Launch Project:

When the project is already set up, and you’re ready to request a designer.

Go to project and select the Design issue;
Fill out the Issue description and include as much detail as possible;
In the issue’s settings, select Move to Team and select Studio 51;
Change the status to Triage;
Once submitted, it will appear in our Triage queue;

Studio 51 Issues view:

Go to ███████████████;
Press C to create a new issue;
Fill out the issue, and link it to a Project and Milestone;
Once submitted, it will appear in our Triage queue;

In Slack, go to the #team51-pub-design-squad channel:

Type /asks;
Select “Design Request → S51 Design” and fill out the short form;
Open the issue you created, and link it to a Project and Milestone;
Once submitted, it will appear in our Triage queue;

Issues will land in ███████████████. Tasks will be assigned to designers (by a designated DRI) based on project type, timeline, and capacity.

Project Types

Showcase sites

High-profile, design-forward sites.
The project’s “showcase” nature should already be known before it reaches the design phase, either via prior discussions in the discovery phase, or the high-profile nature of the partner, involvement of Automattic’s Design Council members, etc.
Any visual updates to Showcase Sites should be run through an internal designer, ideally the previous designer working on the project.
- Examples: Dieline, Noma, PRINT Magazine

Referrals from the Executive Leadership Team

if anyone from our Executive Leadership Team (ELT) is involved directly, or the partner was referred by them.

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Other partners

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Internal websites

Websites for A8c products or other teams/divisions.

Tumblr site

A site to be hosted on Tumblr instead of WordPress.com or Pressable.

No/low-code build

Sites that can be started by a designer and a TAM, with little to no input from a developer.

Showcase & internal sites are generally reserved for internal designers, or assigned to a contractor (with direction from an internal designer, possibly from a different team). These projects may involve feedback and guidance from Automattic’s Design Director(s).

Developers

New site builds

The Special Projects Launch teams work mostly on new site builds. Our team of contract developers does most of the work on new site builds. This includes initial scoping, questions about site architecture, data migrations, and building out the theme and custom functionality.

Note: You should not make requests in the Special Projects Engineering developers request queue for Launch projects. If you feel like you need to make a request in that queue, please ping your team lead to verify if it is the right place for your request.

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To assign a contract developer for your project, follow these steps:

Start by looking at the most recent set of Geekbot results in the team51-contract-dev-standups Slack channel. Look for developers that either have capacity or will have capacity soon (e.g. “finishing up on…” or “last round of changes on…” “waiting for feedback”).
If you can identify someone who’s available from the Geekbot, go ahead and reach out to them in the team51-pub-external Slack channel to make sure they can take on the project and complete it in your timeframe.
If you’re having trouble finding someone to complete the work on time, start a thread in the team51-pub-tam Slack channel, pinging the TAM call word (team51-taes) and we’ll work together to shuffle some things around to get your build in.
Before you approach a developer, it’s a good idea to review their different strengths (███████████████) of the contract team to see who might be a good fit for the project.

If the contract developer working on your project encounters a blocker or needs assistance, either they or you can escalate the issue to our internal developers on the Special Projects Engineering team by pinging #team51-deployers in Slack.

Updates to existing sites

Site support and maintenance

The Special Projects Support teams provide maintenance and support for sites that have previously launched. The developers who handle site support and maintenance requests work closely with our internal developers on the Special Projects Engineering team. These are not the same developers who work on new site builds.

As a member of the Support team, you’ll make support and maintenance requests through our ███████████████. Our Engineering team will triage and assign all requests. Things to keep in mind before you make a new dev request:

During triage, we categorize requests as roughly “Small” or “Large”.
Confirm with the developer before you let the partner know when we’ll be able to complete their request.
Take care when marking a request as “urgent”, because urgent requests mean Engineering triagers will need to reshuffle developer workflows to accommodate them. Before marking a request as urgent, ping your team lead for review.
Don’t duplicate an issue that already exists in a site repo — instead, link to the issue in the site’s repo in your dev request. This helps us keep the dev request queue clean!

Here are the steps for making a request!

Create a GitHub issue in the affected repo (if applicable).
Create dev request via Slack using the command /team51-dev-request, which auto-creates a request (in the form of a GitHub issue) in the Dev Requests repository.
- The dev request should include the following:
  - Title (domain.com | Issue Title)
  - TL;DR (A short summary of what’s happening — usually the first line of the site repo issue — feel free to copy/paste that here)
  - Is the partner active in their repo?
  - Link to issue in partner repo
Check on your new dev request, which will have been created ███████████████. Nice work!

And now for some quirky things.

Weird Username
When looking at your Slack-created dev request issue in GitHub, you may see that there’s some text at the bottom saying “Created in Slack by _____”, but it’s not attributed to your user name. This is because Slack has an entirely separate auto-generated secret username for you, who knew?!

To change this to something that references your name, visit Slack’s settings at https://a8c.slack.com/account/settings in your browser. After you login, at the very bottom beside Username, click “expand” to update the name. Ta-da! Make sure to also edit your GH request issue to a user name that can be associated with your user.

Adding significant new features to an existing site

Sometimes, our existing partners request features to their site that are large enough that they become Launch projects once again. If you’re on the Launch team and you’ve taken over a project from Support, don’t make dev requests for the new work to be done. Instead, you should assign the work to our contract developers just like you would for a new site build. Follow the processes outlined above under New Site Builds.

If you’re ever unsure whether a request for a project you’re working on belongs in the dev queue or should be marked as urgent, please ping your team lead, who can help you review the issue and provide guidance.