Unmet Needs Pipeline
A description of the Unmet Needs Pipeline with links to the feature brief and the current roadmap
The Process
What is an unmet need?
Design systems like Forge are built for a community of designers, developers, and product stakeholders. Forge is a complex, evolving system that partners with our community to identify bugs, potential improvements, and new components and patterns.
When a team is making product design decisions that can’t be solved with an existing component or other asset, we ask that you submit an Unmet Need request. This request will be reviewed by the Component Review Board (CRiB) to make sure it's truly an unmet need, and then will be added to a backlog list of all component work that is happening across R&D.
Click here to go to the current Unmet Needs Pipeline project table.
What is in the backlog?
This list contains Jira stories for components that were originally submitted as contributions to Forge, but were never completed. It also contains components that are being actively built by various product teams for eventual consideration for addition to Forge. And finally, there are some components that have been suggested to Forge and are being scoped and evaluated for business value, in which case they may be planned by Forge for an upcoming release. If you think you have an unmet need, please take a careful look through the stories here to see if there's already been some work done that you could pick up and complete.
What do the different statuses mean?
"Deferred" indicates that the component is not being actively worked on, but may have some design work associated with it.
"Backlog Review" means that the CRiB and the Forge team are scoping the component and building the business case.
"Done" or "Deployed" or "Ready to Deploy" means that the responsible product team has this component in production, but it is not part of Forge.
How do you determine the priority of items in the component backlog?
It's a combination of product team interest and development effort- high interest (more than two teams willing to participate in an alpha) and low to medium effort would give the component a high priority. We also harvest the Commercial Priorities List for opportunities to get behind high-value efforts.
How do I get something into the backlog?
The process for getting a component into this list is simple- add a "recipe" label to any Jira story, and it will display here. There's no approval process. These component stories are evaluated monthly by the Component Review Board (the CRiB), which has representatives from each sub-division. On occasion, the CRiB will identify a new "unmet need" story that could actually be met with an existing component, or by one that is under active development. In these cases, the CRiB will connect the two relevant teams.
What if I need more information?
Post anything in the Component Review Board's Teams Channel!