Design Status — Parallel Design Tracking
Design and engineering rarely move in lockstep. The Design Status field gives your design team their own workflow dimension on every story — running in parallel with development, visible to the whole team, and independent of the development status.
What Is Design Status?
Design status tracks where a story's design work stands. It lives on stories in R&D boards alongside the development status, so the team can see at a glance whether a story is ready from both a design and development perspective.
While a story's status answers "what's happening with development right now?", design status answers "where is design on this?".
The 9 Design Statuses
| Design Status | When to use |
|---|---|
| Pending | Design work hasn't started. Waiting for the story to progress through the pipeline to a point where design input is needed. |
| Working on it | A designer is actively working on this story. Wireframes, mockups, or prototypes are in progress. |
| Internal Review | The designer has a version ready for internal team feedback before sharing externally. |
| Waiting for Feedback | Designs have been shared with stakeholders or the client. Waiting for their response. |
| Changes Required | Feedback has been received and the designer needs to revise. |
| Approved | Designs are approved and final. Engineering can build against these. |
| Completed | Design deliverables are fully done. Handoff to engineering is complete. |
| Not Needed | This story doesn't require any design work. Engineering can proceed directly. |
| On Hold | Design work is intentionally paused. Not blocked by feedback — deliberately deferred. |
Tip: Use "Not Needed" liberally for technical stories, backend work, infrastructure changes, and refactors. It communicates intentionality — the team agreed design wasn't needed, rather than just forgetting to update the field.
Where Design Status Appears
Design status is visible in:
- Story rows in the table view (as an additional column, configurable)
- The story detail panel — right next to the development status
- The Design View — a dedicated kanban board filtered to stories with active design work
The Design View
The Design View is a kanban board built specifically for design workflows. It shows stories grouped by design status, filtered to stories in the early pipeline stages (Review, Backlog, Refinement, Estimation) where design work typically happens.
How to use the Design View:
- Navigate to the board's Design view from the left nav
- Stories are columns by design status — drag them as design progresses
- Filter to a specific designer using the Assignee filter to see one person's design workload
This view is the designer's home base in Lifecycle. It gives them a focused picture of what they're working on without the noise of tasks and deployment statuses.
Dual-Track Development
Design status exists because good product teams run design and engineering in parallel — what's sometimes called "dual-track development."
While the engineering team is building stories from the current sprint, the design team is detailing stories for the next sprint. When stories reach the Estimation stage in the pipeline, the expectation is that design is at or near Completed so engineering can estimate accurately.
A healthy dual-track workflow looks like:
Sprint N: [Story A — In Development] [Story A — Design: Completed]
Sprint N+1 prep:[Story B — In Refinement] [Story B — Design: Working on it]
Sprint N+2 prep:[Story C — In Backlog] [Story C — Design: Pending]
Design status makes this visible. Without it, you have to ask in Slack whether designs are ready. With it, you can see the state of all stories across all tracks at once.
Tip: Set a team norm: stories don't move to Estimation until design status is Approved or Completed (or explicitly Not Needed). This prevents estimation sessions where the team can't give an accurate estimate because the designs aren't finalized yet.
Assigning Designers
There's no separate "designer" assignee field — designers are assigned via the standard assignee field. Use the assignee field on the story and filter by assignee in the Design View to see one designer's workload.
If your team uses a convention like tagging stories with a "Design" team custom field, you can also filter and group by that field.
Grouping by Design Status
In any table or board view, Group by Design Status to see all stories organized by their design state. This is useful for:
- Design team standups — quickly walk through what's in progress and what's blocked
- Sprint planning prep — confirm all stories going into the sprint have Approved designs
- PM reviews — identify where design bottlenecks are forming
Design Status and Notifications
When a story's design status changes to Approved or Changes Required, team members who are assigned to or watching the story can be notified. Configure notification preferences in your account settings.
This keeps engineering informed when designs are finalized — no more "are the designs ready yet?" interruptions.
Customizing Design Status
Design statuses are available on R&D boards for story-level items. If your team doesn't have a design workflow, you can disable the design status field entirely.
How to customize: Open your board → click the gear icon → Fields tab. Toggle Design Status off to hide it from all views and forms. Toggle it back on when your team starts incorporating design reviews.
The available design status values are part of the system defaults. If you need a simpler design workflow, your team can adopt a convention of using only a subset (e.g., just Pending, Working on it, and Completed).