Design strategy check in

← Back to Design craft

What it is: A placemat that helps you keep the bigger picture in mind, while you look at the specific things you’re working on across the team.

When to use it:

• To keep team leadership focused on bigger goals at a craft

• To find a balance between the urgent and the meaningful

• To support identify the 80/20

How to use it:

• Establish the organizational signals of what good design strategy looks like

• Set up a baseline - initially, it can be a gut sense (or the read out from a round of internal interviews)

• The more you actively use it in your reflections, the more powerful this tool becomes

Great for check ins, team retros, and inputs to use as you put together bigger organizational visions.

View fullsize

This works great with

• Department wide objectives

• 1:1 placemats

← Back to Design craft

Design decisions

← Back to Design craft

What it is: Gaining a clear distinction of what we are choosing to do

When to use it:

• When working in larger groups with many perspectives (or throughout your own individual process to feel clear-headed)

• When you have leadership reviews

• When there are multiple good options (and so you’re at risk of second-guessing yourself later)

How to use it:

• Document what it is you are deciding between, and why it is you are choosing one option over another

• Capture the alternatives for future reference

• Include the types of signals that would make you reconsider / go with a different direction

This works great with

• Assumptions map - as you make design decisions, it will help unearth assumptions and hypotheses you are making in choosing specific design details

← Back to Design craft

Design principles

← Back to Design craft

What it is: Like all good strategy, it points to a goal or a what, does not dictate or preclude a certain how. The example that makes me go “ooooh I get it” is the principle “something that gets better with time”: one clear answer being leather. Principles do not dictate a solution - they characterize what about the solution must be true for it to work. They are underpinned by strong insights about how people live life today, think about life today.

How to use principles (once we have them):

• Bring qual insights into actionable starting points

• Be ruthless in culling ideas to hew to closest to principle

• Select metrics that signal we were on the right track

Principles can take many shapes... they can be short pithy statements, they can be large posters capturing the essence of moments, they could be succinct adjectives the team rallies around.

This works great with

• Brainstorming - Principles give you an anchor point to ideate around

• Design decisions - Principles become the measuring stick you can use to gain confidence in choosing one option over another

← Back to Design craft