i love The Double Diamond.

There is a ton of content about the merits of the Double Diamond, so I’m not going to go too in depth here. But I did want to give a glimpse of how I work through problems by following the Double Diamond, and how I use it to establish processes for my team to help them be successful.

Discovery.

When encountering a new problem, you want to have a learning mentality to understand the context of everything that contributes to the problem, the underlying systems, the complexity of it. You go wide and deep to discover insights that might tell you how to solve the problem. The activities here are mostly customer, business and industry research.

Define.

Once you feel you truly understand the problem space, you can start to search for ways to define what a good solution might be. Here you might be creating journey maps and service blueprints, trying to tease out the areas where the biggest opportunity lies. The goal is to have an articulation of the problems to be solved, and what successfully solving them should look like.

Design.

Now that you understand what the right solution should look like, you need to try a lot of different ways to do it. Here you can go wide and explore a variety of executions for implementing your solution(s). This can be vision exercises, story boarding, or design jams with multi-disciplinary teammates. The goal here is to solicit a wide variety of perspectives and ideas, and to collaborate as a team to agree on components we need to deliver to solve the problem right.

Deliver.

Finally, you set out to go build it. Here you take all the great ideas you explored and begin to narrow them down through user research, exploring edge cases, building out the experiential artifacts and moments that your solution requires. It’s in this implementation phase where you should be looking to nail the fine details that make or break your experience. This is the phase where you make it right.

Repeat.

And then, you can choose to start all over again on a quest for constant improvement, or you can move on to another problem to solve.

Using the Double Diamond as a team process.

When working with a cross-functional group of people to execute on a shared goal, it’s important to have a shared language and understanding of how you will work together. In my current role, we’ve used the Double Diamond to create processes and tools to align our product, design, tech, operations, business analysts, spatial design, and marketing partners on how we will work our way through intent – using the process outlined above.

Along the way we created briefs to align all stakeholders on the key problems to solve and document any data, insights, or potential risks. We also standardized a list of key milestones to ensure stakeholder alignment throughout the process, create clarity about which group is accountable for driving progress in each section, and to ensure all partners are aligned before launches of new experiences.

By using the Double Diamond as a framework for shared process across a disparate group of stakeholders, we created clarity and efficiency to help us build quality experiences with input from a diverse group of talented folks. What a great little framework.