Introduction

We’re a small but mighty design team of two, Adalene and Kyle, working as part of the larger Sentry design team. Each team at Sentry has its own approach based on product focus; here’s a look at how we operate at Codecov. If you have any feedback, tweaks, or suggestions, we’d love to hear from you!

Our Workflow

We work in two-week engineering sprints, which help us manage our workload and provide consistent output for engineering and discovery needs aligned with our quarterly goals. We chose GitHub as our project management tool because it’s where our engineers and customers work daily, naturally aligning with our processes.

Most of our work is asynchronous, but we hold regular synchronous sessions for design reviews, issue kickoffs, research debriefs, product audits, and ongoing discovery.

Everything Starts with an Issue

Anyone—internally or externally—can contribute to improving our app by starting with a GitHub issue that defines the problem. We groom these issues for prioritization, valuing documentation, as issues are central to tracking our iterations and decisions. If you have a suggestion or improvement, please let us know here.

Our GitHub project board contains sprint issues, backlog items, discovery work, polish items, bugs, and tech debt. This centralized project view allows us to monitor progress and easily pull dev-ready items when the engineering team has capacity.

Design Review and Feedback Loops

At Sentry, we rely on intuition informed by feedback from multiple sources:

• External Feedback: GitHub issues and discussions, social media alerts, PR comments, in-app banners, surveys, the Sentry feedback tool, user testing, and ad hoc user interviews.
• Internal Feedback: Async GitHub reviews, #discuss-codecov-product-design Slack channel, weekly audit syncs with PM and support, focused project reviews, and weekly Sentry design team reviews.

Synchronous Meetings

Sprint Kickoff with Engineering

We work closely with engineering, attending biweekly sprint kickoffs that include gratitude moments (shoutouts to our peers), sprint focuses for engineers, and design team priorities. This raises awareness of ongoing efforts, allowing us to ask for help where needed.

Issue Kickoff and Breakdown

For more complex issues, design and engineering meet to define the problem, goals, and decide on next steps from the outset.

Product Audits

Each week, Product, PM, and support teams review a specific workflow, identifying immediate fixes and longer-term discovery areas.

Weekly Design Syncs

These include both Codecov design syncs and wider Sentry check-ins. We share current projects and gather cross-team feedback.

Closing

Our process is ever-evolving, but this is how we work today. If you have any thoughts or feedback, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out at kyle.mann@sentry.io or adalene.teh@sentry.io.