My design process

While every project is unique, these are the major phases of my design process. I adapt these four steps to the needs of the problem — whether I’m working on a strategic vision or a tactical roadmap experiment.

Define the problem 

  • At the start of every project, I work closely with my cross-functional team to define the problem space. Depending on the project scope and type, this might look like:

    • Auditing existing research and data

    • Visualizing the competitive landscape

    • Running a workshop with my cross-functional team to align on the core problem

    • Defining opportunities, design principles, and constraints

    • Brainstorming questions and hypotheses

  • Defining the problem collaboratively helps me align with my team on what we need to solve and why. The outcome might take the form of:

    • Problem statement

    • Design principles

    • Opportunities and new ideas

    • Questions and hypotheses

    • Constraints (technical, project scope)

Explore solutions

  • For more tactical work, I explore mocks, flows, or prototypes that help my partners visualize my thinking.

    For larger projects, this might look like a workshop or a brainstorm with my team.

  • A wide range of potential solutions that I can use to gather feedback from customers and my team.

Form a point of view

  • I use the following inputs to converge on a point of view:

    • Qualitative user research

    • Internal feedback from stakeholders and other designers

    • Multivariate experimentation

    • Impact and effort sizing with my engineering team

  • Depending on the needs of the project, I might capture my point of view as:

    • A design proposal in a vision deck

    • Static mocks or prototypes with “eng-ready” specs

    • A proposal multivariate experiment that details what options to test and what to measure

Ship and learn (and repeat)

  • I work closely with my cross-functional team to align on a plan for measuring success and next steps after launch. I build strong relationships with my engineering partners to ensure high quality of shipped work.

    By shipping and experimenting, I also might uncover:

    • A new idea for iterating

    • An updated point of view

    • New quantiative insights to add to our knowledge about the problem space