Building the frameworkEarly strategic alignment methodology

I get it — design is the fun part, especially when tools like Figma supported by a solid design system make it so easy. However, rushing into design without clarity can lead to wasted time on solutions that don’t resonate with stakeholders or address the real problems users face.

That’s why a strong framework in the early stages of design thinking is essential. I advocate starting with research to understand how user experience is influenced by business challenges. I facilitate cross-functional workshops to generate and prioritize solutions for the most pressing user needs. We create narratives from the user's perspective, ensuring that our prototypes are grounded in real use cases.

Crucially, this process is collaborative, involving research, engineering, product management, and content teams. This partnership ensures that everyone not only understands the steps taken, but also champions the final deliverables—high-fidelity, technically feasible designs that effectively tackle the key friction points in user experience.

Designing for impact

This is a highly adaptable framework. While the path above represents a series of steps that can be completed in a single quarter*, I encourage others to adapt it to their own team’s needs. The entire process can be expedited to fit into a design sprint if needed. The most critical outcomes are to ensure that your design prioritization decisions have a clear lineage that can be traced back to user needs, and that the design team is impacting product decision-making.

Common outputs of these exercises will be design docs (user stories, user narratives, product requirements, etc) and other visual artifacts to help build consensus and facilitate user testing (prototypes, journey maps, etc).

*If I level with you, it probably won’t be a very fun quarter.

Step 01.
Define scope of problem
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What is the problem and for whom is it a problem? In these examples, we have user adoption issues impacting our license renewals.

Step 02.
Define challenges within that scope

Speak to users matching the target profile. Have them walk you through common use cases and journeys through the product from their perspective. Have them narrate where they are met by frustrating patterns.

Step 03.
Prioritize challenges
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Continue dialog with users. Partner with PM and other subj matter experts. Which challenges most negatively impact the user experience? Summarize these challenges in the form of user stories and quotations.

Step 04.
Make challenges actionable

Identify patterns in the challenges from the previous step. Create "how-might-we" statements to clarify the challenges and their associated goals, using the format: "How might we <enable users/customers to overcome a thematic challenge> so that <goal>?"

Step 05.
Current state journey map

Once we understand how users interact with the product and identify friction points, we create a journey map. These maps align stakeholders by illustrating what users are doing, thinking, and feeling as they engage with the product to achieve their goals.

Step 06. frame solutions to challenges

Using the HMWs and journey map, we can focus stakeholders on addressing the most critical user issues. I group the HMWs into themes and, in a workshop, have stakeholders propose solutions for each HMW to enhance the product.

Step 07.
prioritize solutions

It's time to vote! Workshops are ideal for generating ideas, so I give participants a few stickers, including 1 or 2 "super votes" for their top choices. After voting, I encourage discussion about the results, allowing participants to advocate for their favorites, which often leads to valuable insights on feasibility and value.

Step 08.
develop themes and narratives

Have participants form teams to identify patterns in the voted ideas. Each group should describe what these patterns mean for the product and user experience. Afterward, they reconvene to present their findings and highlight any common themes that emerge.

Step 09. recommend features from narratives

Often the ideas or narratives need to be refined down to specific features so that they can be further evaluated by the team. If a narrative theme was described more in the abstract, what specific features in-product does it represent?

Step 10.
evaluate tech feasibility

I view design as a partnership, and we share a uniquely collaborative relationship with engineers. At this stage, I use an impact vs. effort matrix to gather input on features. Engineers evaluate effort, while PMs assess impact. This helps us prioritize solutions into short-term, long-term, or those to avoid altogether.

Step 11.
future state journey map

After gathering user feedback, we understand how our new solutions might change their behavior or perception of the product. We should update our journey map to reflect these changes. When presenting to key stakeholders, it’s effective to show the before-and-after journey maps side by side.

End goal
Identify features to prototype

The end goal of this phase of the design thinking framework is to empower and enable designers to begin wireframing prototypes. By going through the exercises relating to the previous steps, designs will arrive at a place of confidence knowing that the concepts identified are solving the most critical user issues impacting the business.