Building a Design Playbook and QA Process
TL;DR
Problem:
As the design team expanded across streams and brands, inconsistencies accumulated. Designers used different standards, handoff methods, and file structures. New hires had no central reference. QA cycles dragged on with repeated back-and-forth between design and content teams.
Role:
I owned Design Operations for the entire design organization while also managing several design teams (Growth, Visual, Product, and Motion) across multiple countries. I built the playbook, restructured QA workflows, and implemented all Jira automation myself.
What I did:
Created a unified design playbook with discipline-specific sections. Restructured QA by splitting content and design into parallel tracks with automated task creation. Changed the order of template-based work to fix issues once instead of repeatedly.
Results:
Brand guideline adoption: 46% to 92%
Designer onboarding time: 3.5 weeks to 1.7 weeks (51% faster)
Visual consistency: +49% in internal audits
QA task reopen rate: 18% to 3% (83% reduction)
Brief-to-QA cycle time: 57% faster
Stakeholder satisfaction with QA: 48% to 87%
Timeline:
Quarter-long process (playbook creation and implementation over 2 months, QA restructure over 4 weeks, overlapping)
Sources: Jira reports, internal audits, survey data
The Problem
As the design team grew across streams and brands, small inconsistencies stacked up:
Designers used different standards, handoff methods, and file structures
New team members had no central onboarding reference
Brand guidelines were applied inconsistently across deliverables
QA had become a bottleneck. Content teams built landing pages using templates the design team created. When pages came to design for QA, we found the same problems repeatedly across multiple pages built from the same template. Fixes were made, but the same mistakes appeared on the next batch.
The Jira workflow made it worse. A single task changed hands between content and design teams. When it moved to design QA, content lost access to run their own checks or continue related work. Everything became sequential instead of parallel.
What I Built
Design playbook
I created a single source of truth for how design work gets done:
Ran sessions with leads to define shared processes and review points
Created discipline-specific sections for UX, visual, product, motion, and branding
Linked everything to Figma templates, QA checklists, and project documentation
Embedded the playbook into onboarding flows and team syncs
This gave new designers a clear starting point and existing designers a consistent reference.
Restructured QA process
I rebuilt QA to run content and design tracks in parallel:
Built Jira automation that creates a separate Design QA task when a content task moves to QA status
The automation copies all necessary information to the design task
Content keeps their original task and can continue working
Design gets only the information they need without the full content history
I also changed the order of template-based work:
Content teams now complete the first template-based page fully
Design QA catches all issues on that first page
Web builders fix the template once
Only then do they duplicate the fixed template for remaining pages
This eliminated repeated fixing of the same mistakes across dozens of pages.
QA checklists
I created detailed checklists for the web builders team covering all recurring issues. They were required to verify every item before marking work as complete. This caught problems before they reached design QA.
Results
All metrics from Jira reports, internal audits, and survey data. Implementation period: one quarter.
Consistency improvements:
Brand guideline adoption: 46% to 92%
Visual consistency across deliverables: +49% (internal audit score)
Onboarding:
Time to first shippable task: 3.5 weeks to 1.7 weeks (51% faster)
QA efficiency:
QA task reopen rate: 18% to 3% (83% reduction)
Brief-to-QA cycle time: 57% faster
Stakeholder satisfaction with QA: 48% to 87%
What Made It Work
The playbook gave designers a shared reference instead of relying on tribal knowledge. Embedding it into onboarding meant new hires started with the right standards.
The QA restructure addressed the root cause of repeated rework. Parallel tracks meant content and design could work simultaneously. Fixing templates before duplication meant fixing issues once instead of dozens of times. Checklists shifted quality responsibility earlier in the process.