Building a new product involves many moving parts and cross-functional stakeholders. From brainstorming to planning to the actual coding, engineering teams are at the helm of bringing a feature to life. It’s critical that engineers ensure alignment and communicate status to avoid shipping delays and keep within scope. There’s never enough time and always more work that could be done—how an engineering team prioritizes and keeps focus is key to their success.
InVision worked with industry-leading engineering teams to create six purpose-built templates to help engineers move from idea to feature launch, all within Freehand.
Map out technical solutions with Architecture Brainstorm
Step outside the box and give your team a dedicated, inclusive space to collaborate on potential architecture diagrams with the architecture brainstorm template. Review business requirements, then use line connectors and pre-formed objects to easily map out the technical details of a given workflow.
- Did you know AWS uses Freehand to workshop potential architecture solutions before creating a final diagram?
Visualize simple or complex systems with Flowcharts
Swiftly evolve your early planning into sophisticated user experiences with a well- thought- out flowchart. Design complex technical diagrams, or create simple process workflows to identify dependencies and bottlenecks with the flowchart template. Keep this Freehand handy—it’s always helpful to have this type of documentation when onboarding new team members!
Set tasks and delivery deadlines with Sprint Planning
Establish a strong foundation for an effective sprint with the sprint planning template. Review project goals, agree on stage gates and timelines, and sync Jira and Azure DevOps tasks so work stays connected. We recommend you be realistic with resourcing and time constraints, and leave room for questions or concerns. Engineering team members should come away understanding the work to be done so they can get started, fast.
Add this Freehand to a Space, along with other project work, so team members and partners can always find and reference the documents they need.
Come together for team rituals with Daily Standup
Engineers often work solo, so a daily standup helps the greater team get visibility into progress, ask questions, and flag potential risks so everyone feels supported. Use the daily standup template to communicate updates live in a Zoom, Webex, or Microsoft Teams call, or give a status report async in the Freehand canvas.
These touchpoints are also crucial to forming team bonds and trust, and helping engineers feel seen and heard. Emoji reactions are encouraged!
Create cross-functional alignment with Project Task Prioritization
You can’t build everything all at once, so product teams often have to make the tough call on which tasks to move forward, and which to drop. Invite stakeholders to brainstorm, review, and vote on what you tackle next with the project task prioritization template. If your team has a reset week post-sprint, consider revisiting the “dropped” list— is there any low hanging fruit you can knock out to crush tech debt or benefit the customer?
Review, recap, and revise with Retrospective
Congratulations—you’ve released a feature! Now it’s time to debrief with your project partners and be transparent about how the sprint went. Use the retrospective template to look back on what worked, what didn’t, and what can be done to make the next build even better. A retrospective is also an ideal moment to compare usage data and user feedback against your project goals, and make adjustments where needed.
