Storefront's Technical & UX Writing Backlog & Intake Process

Wayfair underwent a reorganization, which pulled all of the teams into a
centralized model. With this new model, all of the technical and UX
writers across the Storefront organization have been unified under the User Research and Writing team.

I am the Writing Lead, for the User Research and Writing team, and the Technical and UX Writing Manager. In this role, I am directly managing all of the technical writers and ux writer that support Storefront at Wayfair. In addition to the day to day managerial work, I built the backlog, intake process, and prioritization process from the ground up, rolled it out across the Storefront org, and identified future roadmapping and initiatives for our new team.

The reorganization did not take into account that Technical and UX writing are different disciplines, and that we are not Research writers. The reorg was designed to move into a centralized model, where the decision-making is top down. However, with this model and the confusion about the writing disciplines and ways we had supported Storefront in the past meant that int he transitional period we experienced significant delays in work (due to unclear and diverse priorities) across the organization. How were we supposed to prioritize requests for the entire Storefront team when we had previous been embedded in the unique squads and pods but were now responsible for all of the entire Storefront organization?

As lead for the writing portion of the team, I completed a deep-dive through all existing backlogs across the Storefront org (including for Homebase, Perigold, Platforms, and Customer Experience). This allowed me to identify themes and trends in the tools and processes, the intake processes, and the backlogs and tracking. Ultimately, I was able to understand how work had been submitted to Technical and UX writers, how it was prioritized, and the levels of support the teams offered.

I was able to identify a few common attributes:

- Project details (name and lead)
- Team details (pod/squad)
- Description of project, and the support needed
- Current project status and need date
- Links, resources, and supporting materials

With this information, I was able to develop an intake form that would allow Storefront to request work in a centralized place, requesting support (such as office hours,  copy writing, editing, embedded support, publishing, etc.) and have it  routed to the correct discipline (Technical vs UX writing). These  requests then went into an Airtable backlog, where I was able to provide high level visibility to leadership that helped with roadmapping and planning