Nelson Sarma

Leadership · Episode 03 of 6

Intake, and the polite art of moving a date.

If everything is urgent, nothing is planned. Six mandatory fields and turnaround times published in advance, so an estimate is agreed once rather than renegotiated every time. Three routes for when a date genuinely has to move, none of which begin in my inbox.

Fields required
Six, all mandatory
Turnaround
Published in advance
Routes when contested
Three, none optional

Requests used to arrive with no reference to what the design team was already carrying. Not out of bad faith; cross-functional colleagues simply had no visibility of our queue. A task that looks small from outside lands on a designer already committed for the week, and with no shared reference for what work actually costs, every timeline ends up estimated by the person who wants it fastest.

The compounding effect was predictable. Because deadlines were being squeezed on their side too, almost everything arrived marked urgent. And when every request is an emergency, priority stops carrying any information at all. The queue reverts to whoever asked most recently, or most loudly.

Six fields, before anything enters the queue

  1. Task or project name. A clear identifier, so it can be referred to later without ambiguity.
  2. Description. The scope of what is being asked for.
  3. Stakeholder. A defined business owner: a name, not a department.
  4. Requirement philosophy. The underlying why, and what it is worth to the business.
  5. Expected turnaround. The delivery date the requester has in mind.
  6. Attachments. The documentation and assets the work depends on.

The fourth one is the field people expect to be filler, and it is the one I would keep if I could only keep one. A designer who understands why a thing matters makes better decisions inside the brief than any amount of specification will produce. It is also the field that most reliably reveals when a request has not been thought through yet.

Publishing the turnaround is the whole point

We set baseline turnaround windows for common creative and product tasks, in advance, in the open. Fixing them ahead of time is not administrative tidiness; it moves the estimate out of the conversation entirely.

Once a category of work carries a published turnaround, neither side is arguing from a guess. The requester knows what that asset costs before they ask for it. The designer isn’t defending their own timeline in every thread. The number was agreed once, in daylight, rather than renegotiated per request by whoever had more leverage that week.

An estimate defended in every thread is a negotiation. An estimate published in advance is just a fact about the work.

Intake flow: a request supplies six mandatory fields, then is checked against the published turnaround band. If it fits, it enters the queue. If it does not, it takes one of three routes: the requesting team re-prioritises its own queue, the manager reassigns to the secondary owner, or a department lead escalates formally. Request arrives Six mandatory fields Inside the published band? yes Enters queue no Route A The requesting team re-prioritises its own queue and picks Route B I reassign it to the secondary owner whose profile fits the task Route C A department lead aligns with me directly, genuine exceptions only
The point of the three routes is that a contested date always has somewhere specific to go. Two of the three resolve without me, and the third requires someone senior to put their name on the exception.

What each route is really for

Route A handles the most common case: the designer is blocked by work the same team submitted earlier. The burden shifts back to them; they decide internally which of their own projects slips to make room. That is a trade only they can make, and it turns out they are perfectly good at making it once it is theirs.

Route B is capacity, not priority. If the primary owner is at their ceiling, I audit the queue and move the work to the teammate whose secondary domain fits it: the matrix from Episode 02 doing its job.

Route C exists for real emergencies, and deliberately costs something. A genuine business emergency that needs a shorter timeline than the published band cannot skip the queue automatically. It requires the requesting team’s relationship manager or department lead to align with me directly. Exceptions stay possible; they just stop being free.

What it changed

Cross-departmental alignment improved more than I expected, and mostly because other teams could now make their own trade-offs rather than lobbying for ours. The design team stopped being a reactive asset factory and started being a transparent, predictable utility, which is a duller description and a considerably better job.

The conversation it replaced is the part I would keep. Requests used to open with can you do this?, which is a question about a designer’s willingness. They now open with where does this sit, who owns it, and when should it be done?, which is a question about the queue. None of this was built to control designers. It was built to protect their time.