The Design Intake & Prioritization Kit
Stop managing design requests out of your Slack DMs.
A complete set of templates, scoring tools, and operational guides that give design teams a structured, defensible way to receive, score, route, and communicate about incoming work. It comes with an online kit guide that covers setup, rollout, and current AI tool guidance.
The problem
Sound familiar?
If any of these hit home, this kit was built for your team.
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Requests arrive from everywhere with no standard format
Slack DMs, hallway conversations, vague emails, tickets opened directly by PMs. Each arrives with different context, different urgency assumptions, different timeline expectations. The design lead spends hours clarifying scope.
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Prioritization is political, not principled
Without a scoring framework, priority defaults to whoever asked most recently, shouted loudest, or has the most leverage. Designers resent it. Stakeholders game it. The work that should get done first doesn't.
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Stakeholders have no idea what happens after they submit
A request goes in, then silence. After two days, they ping the design lead. After four, the design manager. After a week, they route around design entirely. The team gets blamed for being unresponsive even when they were working on it.
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Triage is ad hoc and undocumented
The design lead makes decisions from memory and instinct, with no repeatable process and no audit trail. Different requests get evaluated on different criteria. There's no way to explain why one request is behind another without sounding arbitrary.
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The team keeps agreeing to work they're not the right team for
Requests arrive for things engineering can handle directly, that PM needs to scope first, or that belong in a different function entirely. Without formal routing, these absorb triage time and get abandoned mid-stream.
What's inside
10 files across 5 deliverable groups
Most deliverables ship in more than one format. Markdown for Notion, Confluence, Linear, and GitHub. DOCX/XLSX for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. PDFs for polished reference guides.
- 01
Design Request Intake Form
MDDOCXSix-section intake form (Request Identity, What Are You Asking For, Business Context, Scope and Constraints, Success Criteria, Supporting Material) with each field marked Required or Optional. Deployment notes cover Notion, Linear, Jira Service Management, Slack Workflow Builder, and Airtable.
- 02
Priority Scoring Scorecard
XLSXMDFive-factor weighted scoring (Strategic Impact 30%, User Impact 25%, Effort 20% and inverse scored, Urgency 15%, Design Leverage 10%) that produces a 20 to 100 score and suggests a priority level: Critical, High, Standard, or Low. Weights are editable, with a check that they sum to 100%. The Implementation Guide sets up the same scoring in Notion, Airtable, or Linear.
- 03
Request Routing Playbook
MDDOCXFour priority levels (Critical, High, Standard, Low), plus Redirect as a routing outcome when Design Leverage scores 1. Five-step routing logic (complete? right team? blocking condition? score? capacity check), a weekly triage ritual, and queue health signals.
- 04
SLA & Response Commitment Framework
MDDOCXResponse windows by priority level for acknowledgment, triage decision, and estimated start. It commits to response times, not delivery dates. Includes a breach protocol and guidance on rolling the SLA out.
- 05
Stakeholder Communication Templates
MDDOCXTen ready-to-send templates across the request lifecycle: intake received, one for each priority decision (Critical or High, Standard, Low), redirected, incomplete intake, start date change, work in progress update, delivery and handoff, and closing a stale request.
Format guide
Why this kit
What makes it different
There are a lot of templates out there. Here's what makes these better.
Prioritization that's defensible, not just documented
The five-factor scoring model produces a number you can show a stakeholder. When the VP of Marketing asks why their project is behind the engineering-requested work, the answer isn't 'trust me'; it's a score, and the formula is shared. That's a different organizational dynamic.
Ten communication templates that close the feedback loop stakeholders never get
Most intake systems are input-only. This kit includes the output: acknowledgment within your published response window, a message for each priority decision, a redirect note, work-in-progress updates, and a clean close for stale requests. Stakeholders who know what's happening stop routing around the team.
The routing logic prevents work that shouldn't be in the design queue
Five routing steps run before anything enters the queue: is the request complete, is design the right team, is there a blocking condition, what does it score, and is there capacity. Incomplete requests go back to the requestor. When Design Leverage scores 1, the request is redirected, because another team can do it without design. Having the vocabulary changes the conversation.
SLA commitments that set expectations before complaints are filed
The SLA & Response Commitment Framework sets acknowledgment, triage, and estimated start windows for each priority level. Response times, not delivery dates. Publishing these SLAs proactively changes how stakeholders interpret silence. They know the commitment. They hold the team to it. That's accountability, not bureaucracy.
Built for Notion, Airtable, Linear, and spreadsheets
The templates ship in Markdown and DOCX. The Priority Scoring Scorecard is a live XLSX that scores up to 50 requests, and its Implementation Guide gives you formula syntax for Notion and Airtable plus a setup for Linear. The working tools are things you edit, not PDFs you glance at once.
Who this is for
A specific kind of team
This kit is for you if...
- Design leads personally handling all intake routing who need a defensible prioritization framework
- DesignOps practitioners standing up a request management process from scratch
- Teams of 2–15 designers whose request volume has outgrown informal coordination
- Teams that started with the Clarity Kit's intake form and need the full scoring, routing, and stakeholder communication system
Probably not for you if...
- Teams where request intake is already working well
Where to start
Start with your sharpest pain point
Don't try to deploy everything at once. Pick the deliverable that solves your most urgent problem first.
| If your pain is… | Start with | Then add |
|---|---|---|
| "Prioritization decisions feel arbitrary to stakeholders" | Priority Scoring Scorecard | Stakeholder Communication Templates (priority decision templates) |
| "Stakeholders keep asking where their request is" | Stakeholder Communication Templates | SLA & Response Commitment Framework (publish the windows) |
| "We're agreeing to work we shouldn't be doing" | Request Routing Playbook | Design Request Intake Form (scope section) |
| "Requests arrive with no context and I spend hours clarifying" | Design Request Intake Form | Stakeholder Communication Templates (Incomplete Intake template) |
| "I make all triage decisions from memory with no audit trail" | Request Routing Playbook + Priority Scoring Scorecard | SLA & Response Commitment Framework |
Ready to start?
Stop rebuilding
from scratch.
One purchase. 10 files. All formats included. Instant download.
Other kits
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Intake & Prioritization Kit
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