Managing incoming ideas, prioritizing work, and generating new high-impact research topics can be a challenge for any design team. For our team, it was especially important that we were making decisions about which work to move forward in a consistent vision-aligned way. Finally, we needed a tool that could be used easily by team members working both from home and the office as we moved forward in a hybrid environment due to COVID-19. 

Through meetings with team leaders, an analysis of team artifacts, and understanding the impact of past work; I identified four key criteria that the quality of ideas was being evaluated with by our team. I also determined that a lower fidelity solution, rather than investing in a third party tool, would allow us both maximum flexibility and access by our team as we started using the tool and determined what was the most helpful for us to use. Aligned to the four decision criteria, I created simple rubrics that would allow us to generate a project score and grade. Embedded notes make the main grid easier to access and navigate quickly by the whole team, while a sheet featuring the full text of the rubrics and examples allows us to align and norm as a team on project quality. 

To perform initial tests of the tool, I added in past work and evaluated using the more formalized criteria to ensure that those project ratings generally aligned with team sentiment about quality and potential of work. I then shared the pipeline tool at a team meeting to solicit additional thoughts and feedback. Based on their feedback, I improved the metrics we were using to categorize project size and therefore improve the sorting capabilities.