2024
Redesigning milestones to support real-world workflows
KATA Milestone redesign improved usability, visibility, and automation, addressing issues like poor real-world alignment, lack of setup guidance, and manual tracking. As a result, milestone usage increased by 102% streamlining project tracking and reducing manual effort for project owners.
COMPANY
Kata
ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
Ricky Leatham, Rick Boykin, Paul Spheeris
CONTEXT
KATA Milestones serve as key reference points for tracking project progress, helping project owners (POs) and stakeholders stay aligned. However, user feedback and data analysis revealed that the current milestone system was not robust enough to support real-world workflows.
PROBLEM
Visibility into milestone progress was limited, there is no guidance for team members, and project owners spend excessive time manually tracking milestone-related information.
Create Milestone modal and tracking on the project dashboard before redesign.
USAGE DATA AND SURVEY INSIGHTS
To maximize efficiency with a short timeline, we analyzed Mixpanel usage data on milestone setup behavior and sent out a survey to our Kata Champions: customers in the top 10% of users.
GOAL
The redesign aimed to:
Help users understand what milestones are, why they matter, and how they fit into KATA.
Enable users to associate KATA primitives (action items, artifacts, events, dependencies) with milestones.
Make it easy to track milestone progress and outstanding work.
Elevate KATA Milestones as a core feature within the platform.
SOLUTION
Working with our Head of Product and developers, I designed an improved milestone system with the following changes:
More robust milestone creation ✨
Structured but flexible milestone template
Provide inline suggestions to help users determine what information to include
Better Association with KATA Primitives 🔗
Allow users to directly link artifacts, action items, events, and dependencies to milestones.
Enable dynamic updates based on linked items (e.g., action item is marked complete when a demo is posted).
Improved Visibility on the Project Dashboard👀
Designed a milestone progress tracker to show at-a-glance completion status.
Added milestone gantt chart for better oversight on the project progress
Launch and Metrics
The redesign offered a lot of improved functionality, however, we needed to approach the launch incrementally so we could get features out as soon as possible to our customers.
🔄 Phase 1: MVP Launch (3 weeks of development time)
Released the new milestone creation flow with structured guidance
Enabled basic association with KATA primitives: Action Items and Artifacts
Enabled events to be associate with action items to trigger completion
🔄 Phase 2: Enhancements (Additional 2 weeks of development time)
Automation features for Jira and Github artifacts
📈 Phase 3: Impact on Milestones
From the MVP Launch and Enhancements, we were able to increase our milestone usage to 102%. In addition, 25% more artifacts are being attached to milestones aiding in showing progress amongst
