Every layer read the same weekly picture of the work.

Counts of open requests could not explain the work behind them

Reporting started as a Jira dashboard, exported to a spreadsheet that the director of product design took to the VP of product. The VP and the product directors used it to work through conflicts and concerns. It counted requests: how many were pending, how many were in progress, and how many were marked as waiting on design.

Those counts could not explain a timeline, a decision or the work behind either. When a deployment slipped while a request sat in waiting on design, the report could not show where the delay started, and design had no data to give its side of the story.

Four measures showed where design time went

Time tracking ran through Tempo, a Jira plugin, and fed four org-health measures. Within six months every team had a baseline. The measures showed where design time went, where work came back, and where the partnership with product and development could improve. They also gave the department the evidence to ask for new tools, resources and headcount.

Designers could see every number recorded about their own time

At first, designers read time tracking as surveillance. Every team member was taken through the workflows and what the tracking was for. In operational meetings I showed how the data was used, and made sure leaders did not use it as a main measure of performance.

The leadership team made two commitments. Every metric drawn from time tracking stayed open to the people it described, to review and question. If their data came into an issue that involved them, they would hear about it early, know the full situation, and take part in the review.

One report, read at each layer

Each month I led an all-staff meeting that shared the previous month's operational metrics. Everyone had access to the reports, and anyone could book a 1:1 in my weekly office hours to ask about them. The measures later fed employee development and evaluations, and showed where a gap in delivery started, so the team that owned it could close it.