🎄 Advent Day 20: Exploring the Kharkiv Region and Making Jira Work for Designers

December 24, 2024

A Festive Hello from the Kharkiv Region

Today, our intrepid adventurer, Jetty, sets foot in the bustling Kharkiv region—a vibrant area in northeastern Ukraine known for its strong academic traditions, rich cultural heritage, and architectural marvels. The city of Kharkiv itself (once the capital of Soviet Ukraine) overflows with energy, boasting one of Europe’s largest citysquares, Freedom Square, and the impressive constructivist-style Derzhprom building.

Even during the frosty winter months, Kharkiv remains a lively hub of activity. Visitors and locals alike can enjoy a festive atmosphere in Gorky Park, transformed into a magical wonderland of twinkling lights, winter rides, and cozy hot-chocolate stands. Beyond the city limits, the wider Kharkiv region offers charming small towns, rolling landscapes, and warm hospitality—reminding us that Ukraine’s beauty and resilience shine especially bright in the holiday season.

A Culinary Note: Kharkiv’s Borshch Twist

If you’re in Kharkiv for the holidays, don’t miss out on a steaming bowl of the local take on borshch, Ukraine’s beloved beetroot soup. This regional variation often features kidney beans for extra heartiness, served with a dollop of sour cream and accompanied by fresh rye bread—perfect for warming up on a snowy evening.

Meet Alesya, Our Holiday-Ready Design Lead

Joining us on this festive journey is Alesya, our brilliant Design Lead. Much like the Kharkiv region itself, Alesya is brimming with creative energy. She’s here to share holiday productivity tips for designers juggling project deadlines, family gatherings, and the (wonderful!) chaos that December often brings.

With the scene set, grab a cozy beverage and settle in—because next up is Alesya’s guide on making Jira truly work for designers. Whether you’re finalizing a brand refresh or collaborating on complex user flows, these practical tips and insights will help you stay organized, creative, and in sync with your team. Let’s dive in! Untitled design (23).png

Making Jira Work for Designers: Practical Tips, Tricks, and Real-World Examples

Designers and Jira aren’t always a natural match. Developers often swear by Jira as their “source of truth,” while designers can find it clumsy, unwieldy, or too “process-heavy.” However, with a bit of customization and a shift in perspective, you can turn Jira into a powerful ally that helps you stay organized, iterate quickly, and collaborate more effectively with the entire product team. Below, we’ll explore practical tips and tricks—drawn from real-world design teams—that illustrate how you can make Jira work for designers instead of against them.

1. Why Jira for Designers?

When first asked to track design work in Jira, many designers push back. The typical developer-oriented “story and epic” approach doesn’t always translate neatly into design flows, sketches, or iterative explorations. Yet, design often depends on tight collaboration with product managers and engineers, especially in Agile environments. By structuring your Jira approach around iterations and user tasks, and by creating a designer-friendly workflow, Jira can become a single source of truth for cross-functional teams—including designers.

Key Benefits

Better cross-team alignment: Engineering teams rely heavily on Jira, so joining them in the same tool streamlines communication and reduces confusion.
Improved visibility: Product managers and stakeholders can see exactly where the design stands at any point.
Historical record of design decisions: Attached designs and comments in Jira capture how your interface evolves, which is invaluable for future reference.

2. Setting Up a Designer-Centric Jira Project

A great first step is to create your own workspace or project within Jira—a dedicated “home base” for design work. This can be done in just a few clicks if you’re using Jira’s “next-gen” (team-managed) project type. Here’s how to set yourself up for success:

Sign Up or Sign In
Visit the Jira website (or your company’s Jira instance) and create an account if you don’t already have one.
Create a New Project
- Choose a template: Kanban for continuous flow or Scrum for iterative sprints.
- Name the project something design-focused, such as “Design Team Workspace” or “UX/UI Projects.”
Invite Your Team
- Designers, product managers, developers, and any other stakeholders who need visibility into design progress.
- If you work with external contractors or agencies, you can manage permissions so they only see relevant tasks.

3. Defining Custom Issue Types (Speak a Designer’s Language)

Traditional Jira issue types—Stories, Bugs, Tasks—often feel developer-centric. Designers deal with user flows, sketches, prototypes, research findings, brand assets, and more. Tailoring issue types to reflect the real artifacts of your design workflow makes Jira friendlier and more intuitive for designers. Examples include:

Spec: For detailed design specifications or final deliverables.
Research: For user tests, usability studies, or analytics tasks.
Flow: For bigger-picture, end-to-end user journey explorations.
Iteration: For distinct rounds of revisions or design explorations.
Visual Design (or “Sketch/Mockup”): For quick visual iteration tasks.

Tip: Keep your custom issue types fairly simple. Overcomplicating them can lead to confusion and hamper your team’s ability to manage smaller tasks.

4. Stories and Epics: Mapping Design Work to User Tasks

One of the trickiest parts of using Jira as a designer is deciding how to break down work into Epics and Stories. A helpful approach:

Epics Represent User Tasks
- As a designer, you want your Epics to align with what the user is trying to accomplish (e.g., “As an admin, I want to create a new cloud connection”).
- This way, your design Epics can directly map to the engineering team’s Epics, making cross-team collaboration seamless.
Stories Represent Iterations
- Each Story in your “Product Design” backlog is simply one iteration or “round” of design.
- The Story finishes when you’re ready for feedback from your team—usually after you address a “punch list” of feedback items from the last review.

Why Iterations Make Sense

You rarely know how many design iterations you’ll need up front. Some features come together quickly, others require multiple rounds of exploration.
Each iteration is small enough to be completed in a sprint (Scrum) or within a week or two (Kanban), ensuring frequent checkpoints.

5. Designing a Workflow That Reflects the Design Lifecycle

Jira’s new team-managed (next-gen) projects make it easy to define columns on your board that map to the real steps in your design process. For instance:

Backlog: Your to-do list of pending ideas, requests, or design tasks.
Exploring SketchingSketching: Low-fidelity sketches, wireframes, or conceptual mockups.
Review / Sparring: Where you share your iteration for critique by other designers, product managers, or stakeholders.
Speccing: Polishing your designs, adding final annotations, or turning rough mockups into pixel-perfect specs.
Copy Review: Content design or UX writing input to ensure consistent language and tone.
Done: Final designs or specs that are approved, documented, and ready for development handoff.

Pro Tip: Use Automation Rules in Jira so that when a ticket moves to “Copy Review,” your Content Designer automatically gets pinged, saving time on back-and-forth communication.

6. Capturing Feedback and Linking Designs

6.1. “Punch List” in the Description

Each time you review a design iteration with your team, you’ll come away with changes or additions. Write these as bullet points in the Description of the next iteration’s ticket. That list becomes your “Definition of Done” for that iteration. Once you address those points, you can mark the ticket as complete.

6.2. Attach or Link to Designs

Whenever you wrap up an iteration:

Attach an exported PDF or image of your design to the Jira ticket, or
Link to the design if you’re using tools like Figma, Sketch Cloud, or Abstract.

If your design tool doesn’t version older designs, make sure to attach older iterations to avoid confusion about what changed.

7. Working with Sprints (for Scrum Users)

If you prefer Scrum over Kanban, you’ll manage sprints in Jira:

Backlog: A list of tasks not yet pulled into a sprint.
Create a Sprint: Drag relevant design tasks from the backlog into the sprint.
Start and Monitor: Keep an eye on the board and use the burndown chart to track progress.
Review & Retrospective: When the sprint ends, reflect on what worked well and how to improve the design iteration process.

Sprints force a natural cadence for design reviews—ideal for teams that like time-boxed, iterative cycles.

8. Integrations with Design Tools

Designers often rely on specialized tools, and Jira integrates with many of them:

Figma: Add-on solutions let you embed Figma frames or prototypes directly in Jira issues.
Sketch: Plugins export artboards automatically to Jira.
InVision: Collaborate on clickable prototypes and attach them to your Jira Stories.
Abstract: Version control for Sketch files can link branches to corresponding Jira tickets.

Tip: Explore the Atlassian Marketplace for designer-focused add-ons that streamline handoffs, annotate designs, or manage assets.

9. Estimating and Reporting for Design

One hidden advantage of tracking your design work in Jira is the ability to estimate future projects more accurately:

Story Points or Time Estimates: Because each iteration is a separate Story, you can quickly see how many points or hours it took to complete a feature’s design in the past.
Closed Epics: Each Epic is tied to a user task, so once done, you can measure total points spent to better forecast how long a similar user task might take in the future.
Reports: Built-in charts (such as Velocity, Burnup/Burndown, and Cumulative Flow) provide insights into how fast your team completes design tasks, highlighting bottlenecks or inefficiencies in your process.

10. Tips from the Field: Real Designer Workflows

“Create your own workspace.”

We wanted our own design-centric Jira project so we could customize it without impacting the dev team’s board. This gave us freedom to define a workflow that matches our creative process.

“Map your Epics directly to user tasks.”

This makes it easy for developers to see how your design tasks link to their sprints. Transparency fosters collaboration.

“Use the new, simpler rules.”

We have an automation that pings our content designer when the ticket moves into ‘Copy Review.’ Saves us from forgetting or having to manually assign tasks.

“Attach every iteration.”

When you mark a ticket ‘Done,’ link or attach the final design. That prevents confusion, especially when the next iteration changes drastically.

“Short, frequent feedback loops.”

Don’t wait until you have polished hi-fidelity designs to share. Smaller iterative stories encourage devs to give early feedback, so design can stay one step ahead of development.

11. Overcoming Common Challenges

“Jira feels too rigid!”
- Customize your board columns to suit your design phases.
- Use your own language for issue types.
“I hate writing stories!”
- Keep them succinct. A single iteration is a story, with just enough text to define scope and attach design files.
“I can’t see the bigger picture!”
- Use Epics to represent user tasks and link them to your designs so you can see how all the pieces tie together.

12. In Closing: Embrace the Process, Not the Paperwork

Designers often recoil at the idea of “too much process,” fearing it might stifle creativity. But a well-tuned Jira setup is more about removing friction and ensuring that you always know the status of your designs, what feedback is needed, and how your work ties into the broader product roadmap. With short, iterative stories, relevant columns, and a focus on user tasks, Jira can evolve into the design team’s friend—not another bureaucratic hurdle.