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Straddle 101 - Internal

Projects

tl;dr

Adopting Linear "Projects" to enhance visibility in project progress and scope, addressing our current challenges in tracking and planning work effectively.

A project is defined as a larger piece of work that has a clear outcome or completion date, such as launching a new feature. Projects can be shared across multiple teams and come with their own unique features, graphs, and notification options, addressing our need for clarity, efficiency, and collaboration in project tracking.

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Narrative

The adoption of Linear "Projects" is a strategic move to overcome our current hurdles with project visibility. It's about transforming our approach to project management by introducing a system where progress and scope are transparent and easily accessible. This change will allow us to better track milestones, assess task statuses, and plan future work with a higher degree of precision and confidence.

Problem

Our current challenge is the lack of visibility on the progress and scope of ongoing work. This leads to difficulties in tracking project milestones, understanding the current status of tasks, and effectively planning future work. Adopting a more structured and transparent project management tool is essential to address these visibility issues.

Solution

Adopting Linear "Projects" will provide a structured framework for managing significant work efforts. This platform will provide us with the needed visibility by offering clear project timelines, status tracking, and scope definition.

With Linear's interface and robust tracking features, we can gain real-time insights into each project's progress, understand the workload, and anticipate project completion dates more accurately.

This will not only enhance our ability to manage current projects but also improve our planning for future initiatives.

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Loading linear.app⁠

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What’s a project?

Projects define larger pieces of work that have a clear outcome or completion date, such as launching a new feature. They can be shared across multiple teams and come with their own unique features, graph, and notification options.

Projects in Linear: They are akin to epics in Agile. Projects encompass larger initiatives or significant work efforts with a clear outcome or completion date, like launching a new feature or a major product overhaul. A project in Linear.app is a broad, high-level category that can span multiple teams and may consist of many different tasks or objectives.

Issues in Linear: These are similar to user stories in Agile. Issues are the individual tasks or pieces of work that need to be completed. Each issue is a specific, actionable item that contributes to a project. In Linear issues are the smaller, more granular tasks that feed into the larger goal of a project.

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`Project Lead`⁠
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Each project is assigned a lead from the engineering department, who plays a pivotal role in the project's management and execution. Here's a detailed description of the project lead's responsibilities:

Spec Writing and General Execution: The project lead is in charge of crafting the project’s technical specification and overseeing the general execution of the project. This involves outlining the project's goals, timelines, and the specific tasks required to achieve these goals.

Collaboration and Delegation: While the project lead is responsible for the overall direction and coordination of the project, they also collaborate with other team members. The team members contribute to the project brief, split up areas of work, and write their own issues related to the project.

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Weekly Project Updates⁠

: A key responsibility of the project lead is to provide weekly updates on the project's progress. These updates are short status reports that include a health indicator and a rich text description, offering both a high-level signal of the current state of the project and more in-depth information on its status and progress.

Content of Updates: The updates include a concise overview of project progress since the last update. They cover key aspects such as any delays, changes in target dates, assignments of new leads, progress towards milestones, and the overall progress of the project.

Communication and Stakeholder Management: The project lead ensures that all stakeholders, including team member, others in the organization, and potentially external partners or customers are kept informed about the project's progress. This is facilitated through the project updates and can also include direct communication in meetings or via collaboration tools like Slack.

Adapting and Responding to Feedback: As project leads receive feedback from team members and stakeholders, they are responsible for adapting the project plan and execution as necessary. This includes managing any changes to the project scope, timelines, and resource allocation.

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