Establish these core elements up front to clarify your best product solution
You can quote my partner-in-[design]crime and I on that.
I’ve dedicated most of my career to digital design within the walls of big business. The endless uphill battle never ceases to remind me that traditional business models have yet to fully adopt design into the fold. But what can I say, I like a challenge. Over the years, I’ve come by a lot of lessons — some encouraging, some necessary, some painfully cringe-worthy. Thankfully, those lessons are finally actualizing into insight that I hope business partners and designers, together, can leverage to better approach product design.
As a digital product designer, my roadshow opening line is: “My job is to design solutions that solve for user’s problems through the lens of the company’s mission and vision.”
*mic drop*
The journey to successfully arrive at these solutions, however, is multifaceted and complex. You’ll find no smooth sailing in this line of work. With the digital landscape quick to change, your operation needs to react to shifting business needs and, ideally, adapt without losing much momentum. To do that, you must invest time up front to strategically align business and experience, before diving into a design thinking process. These strategically aligned building blocks — strategy, pillars and principles — are the core elements of a system that will form a strong structural support for the designing process and help you weather pitfalls along the way.