Mar 21, 2023 4 min read Obsidian

How Obsidian Helps Me Prioritize Projects with my Tech Lead

To help me prioritize my projects with my Tech Leads, separate from one-on-one and weekly scrum meetings, I like to put together a Project Breakdown sheet for them. This article explains how I use Obsidian to do that.

Photo by airfocus / Unsplash

My full-time job is as a Senior Project Manager at a digital agency. I run projects for clients where we support their website maintenance, work on enhancements, designs, SEO, and the occasional website upgrade. In the past, I have even managed website redesigns and relaunches.

In my role, I manage different experts, from design experts, UX experts, web development experts, tech architects, etc. Often, I'm teamed with a Tech Lead who helps me manage the projects and delegate tasks to any web developer we need to help us get work done.

Right now, I'm working with three different tech leads. Each of these three tech leads helps me run various projects for me. I run about ten projects with small, medium, and large clients.

To help me prioritize my projects with my Tech Leads, separate from one-on-one and weekly scrum meetings, I like to put together a Project Breakdown sheet for them.

After setting up Obsidian Projects to help me manage my content, I realized I could leverage Obsidian Projects to help me manage other things. Creating a Tech Lead Template ad Tech Lead Breakdown database helps me manage my Tech Leads and keep everything organized.

As stated in previous articles, I decided at the end of 2022 to make Obsidian my daily driver for note-taking. Through Obsidian, I have a future-proof system for taking notes and have devised clever ways to organize my data.

In this article, I will walk through my process.

Obsidian Walkthrough Review

Before deep-diving, if you're not already familiar with the basics of Obsidian, please read through the following articles:

You will need the following Obsidian Community Plugins to use my template:

Projects (NOTE: If you are unfamiliar with Obsidian Projects, read this article first, where I discuss Obsidian Project in full detail and go over how I set things up.)
Templater
Dataview

Tech Lead Breakdown Template

Each project for me begins with a template.

The template holds the metadata, which Projects use to create cells for the database tables, filters, data sorting, etc.

For my template, I've broken down the metadata to include the following things I want to see in my Projects database table:

creation date
modification date
Tech Lead
Week
Projects
Priorities
Reminders
Is Code Review Needed?
Google Doc Link
QA Needed:
Tags

The following section uses Templater code to automate the week and date of the Tech Lead Breakdown.

Listing the Projects Section

The Project List sections include a header for each project, the project board they are associated with, with three checkbox items underneath each project.

Finally, I close my template with a Misc Note header and an empty checkbox for any additional notes or highlights I must flag to my Teach Lead.

The Project Database Table

With the above metadata, I can review my Tech Lead Breakdown sheets and reference them however I want to. Importantly, I can easily copy/paste or export this data for my Teach Lead because each listed item originates as a text file.

Google Doc Link

Currently, I export everything to my Tech Lead as a Google Doc. I wish I didn't have to do this extra step, but as far as I know, and as of the writing of this article, there is no way to share my note with anyone else as I can a Google Doc.

A plugin called Quickshare creates a unique link I can share with anyone I want of my text file. However, that person can only view the data and not update it. And what I wish my Tech Leads to be able to do is add notes and comments and check off items complete as they get things done.

If you would like to get a copy of my Tech Lead template, you can do so here: