Managing assignment in small team - Use assignee or team?

Aimee Roddick (Walter)

Currently, I am working on a small team, with 5 developers and 2 design members. The developers have defined owning areas, but the 2 on the design team share responsibility. 

Creating and assigning engineering tickets is straightforward, as we always know the engineer that would be responsible for the case we're creating of the 5 engineers. However, when the team is creating a design case, it may be owned by either of the 2 designers, and we may not know that at the time of case creation. 

There is a field for "Team" that could be used to choose Design team vs. Assignee, but I was wondering - how are others doing this today? Have you come up with anything creative that you could share?

Jorge Cammarota_rnitw6

Hi Aimee, how are you?

I've seen this scenario in several small teams (dev + design) and, generally, what tends to work best is combining the two: Assignee + Team, but at different points in the workflow.
When creating a ticket: use “Team” (Design Team) as the “initial owner”

When the team doesn't yet know which designer will take the work, some practices I see quite often are:

Blank assignee or assigned to a “triage owner” (e.g., the design lead or a generic “Design Inbox”).

Team field = Design (or “Product Design”, “UX”, etc.).

Optional: a custom field like “Design Area” (e.g., Visual, UX Research, UX Writing) if this helps later in deciding who takes it.

The logic here is:

“Initially, the ticket belongs to the Design Team, not to a person.”

This allows:

Easily filtering by pending work from the design team.

Performing a bulk review (triage) of new design tickets.

In triage/planning: move from “team” to “person”
In almost all successful cases I've followed, there's a clear triage or planning moment where someone handles the assignment:

In a quick design meeting (daily/weekly) or during sprint planning:

They look at all tickets with Team = Design and an empty or generic Assignee.

They decide who will be the responsible designer based on:

capacity for the week

expertise (product area, problem type)

They update the Assignee to the correct designer.

(Optional) They keep the Team = Design field for cross-time reporting and visibility.

This creates a healthy separation:

Ticket creation: focused on logging the work.

Triage/planning: focused on assigning the right person.

When does it make sense to use only Assignee?

When the team is very small and stable (like 2 permanent designers) and you have good daily communication, some teams opt for an even simpler model:

In the creation phase, they leave Assignee blank.

The designers use their own filter, such as:

“All unassigned design tickets for this project”

And they coordinate among themselves (via daily/Slack) who takes what, assigning it to themselves.

This works well when:

The team is mature and communicates a lot.

There isn't a strong need for reports by "Team".

The volume of design tickets isn't huge.

It might make sense, or it might not; it will depend on each scenario.