Methodology
Process
Design is a non-linear journey that emphasizes visibility, ownership, and alignment. This process framework reduces variance, improves quality, and ensures seamless collaboration across phases.
The 5 Design Phases
🔮 Define
Goal: Define the problem, goals, and scope of the project.
Key Activities:
Kickoff with stakeholders to align on objectives
Conduct stakeholder interviews to gather requirements
Initialize the project brief and design story
Present initial brief to engineering team
Deliverables: Project Brief, Design Story
🔍 Research
Goal: Gather insights and inspiration to inform the design process.
Key Activities:
Define research methods and objectives
Conduct necessary research (user interviews, analytics, competitive analysis)
Synthesize and document findings
Present research to create shared understanding
Deliverables: Exploratory prototypes, user personas, journey maps, competitive analysis, usability testing, research synthesis
🚧 Iterate
Goal: Generate and refine design concepts through iterative process.
Key Activities:
Brainstorm and sketch initial ideas
Create wireframes, visual comps, and prototypes
Conduct design reviews with stakeholders
Iterate based on feedback
Deliverables: Wireframes, user flows, visual comps, high-fidelity prototypes
✅ Validate
Goal: Validate designs through user testing and feedback.
Key Activities:
Conduct usability testing with prototypes
Refine designs based on user feedback
Present final designs to leadership
Ensure designs meet user needs
Deliverables: Final designs, usability testing results
🚀 Finalize
Goal: Prepare final designs for development.
Key Activities:
Conduct technical design review
Prepare design layouts and components for handoff
Collaborate closely with developers during implementation
Ensure design acceptance through review process
Deliverables: Design handoff, design system updates, product marketing collateral
Product Development Integration
"All work is a series of processes, and each process has its supplier as well as its customer."
— Masaaki Imai
Design should begin 3-4 months before development to allow adequate time for research, iteration, and stakeholder alignment. The process integrates with broader product development:
Pre-Development: Roadmap → Planning/Scoping → Design → Leadership Presentation
Development: Sprint Planning → Technical Review → Handoff → Implementation
Post-Development: Testing → Deployment → Launch → Analytics
Keys to Success
Don't Skip Steps: Development should never start without finalized designs and stakeholder alignment. Each phase builds critical understanding for the next.
Non-Linear Process: While phases provide structure, design involves iterative cycles of planning, execution, and feedback. Be prepared to revisit earlier phases based on new insights.
Collaboration First: Success depends on visibility, ownership, and alignment across Product, Design, and Engineering. Regular ceremonies and clear deliverables ensure seamless handoffs.
User-Centered: Every phase should connect back to user needs and business objectives. Use data and user feedback to guide decisions and validate solutions.
Principles
These principles are meant to guide my team’s work and culture. They combine purpose, creativity, and rigor while keeping the process enjoyable and impactful.
1. No pain-points, just vibes*
“If you’re bored by your own work, you’re doing something wrong.”
— FGT Design Team
The problems we work on are hard enough. Be on the lookout for internal strife. When work feels like a struggle, that’s a sign to pause, rewind and fast-forward. Take a beat, assemble as a team to reflect on why the vibes are off, and make a plan to move forward together.
The more you enjoy your work, the more others will enjoy working with you, and the better our results will be.
* Credit Ken Hill for coining the phrase “No pain-points, just vibes”, in a team ceremony. The phrase really took a life of it's own and served as our team motto at Front Gate Tickets.
2. Identify the Resonant Frequency
Each project has some purpose behind it that strikes a chord with the user, the business and the team building it. Know the why behind each project. Tap into design’s inherent coolness to align teams around a shared vision by owning the design story in product presentations.
3. Quantify the Impact
“Speak with data... Trying to solve a problem without hard data is akin to resorting to hunches and feelings – not a very scientific or objective approach."
— Masaaki Imai
Back up the story with data. Measure outcomes of individual, team, and project goals. Use data to document, prove, and evolve impact.
4. Problem First
“The problem is always derived from the subject; the solution is always hidden somewhere in the problem.”
— Paul Rand
Keep a problem-first mindset. Use techniques like the 5 Whys to uncover root causes. Try “un-ideas” to spark creativity by imagining the worst solutions or opposite problems. Problems and solutions are two sides of the same coin.
5. Aim for non-linear results.
“Know the game you're in... Play the game as a sequence of options.”
— Kobe Bryant
How can you solve multiple problems with one elegant solution? How can your work help you and the team level up as a whole? See work as an opportunity, not just for the problem at hand, but also how it may align with your own goals. Look for solutions that expand possibilities for users, instead of binary results.
6. A prototype is worth a 1000 meetings
Prototype before you spec. So much time is wasted in traditional spec-driven development talking and guessing about solutions we don’t fully understand, when you could just build a prototype and find out.
Leverage prototypes to gain a deeper understanding of the problem space before writing specs. Prototypes are questions, not answers. Design prototypes to uncover why something works, not just what works.
Don’t be afraid of throw-away code. Start small, scrappy, and refine as you go.
7. Simplify, then add lightness
“Adding power makes you faster on the straights. Subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere.”
— Colin Chapman
UX works the same way: reduce cognitive load, minimize clutter, build on existing models, and offload tasks when possible.
Ethics
Designers are ethicists. As we enter the age AI, this is more true than ever. We are not just responsible for evaluating the output of our own work anymore.
Design sits between the business, technology and the user. Each with their own bias, it’s designs’ job to be aware of those biases and create products that are ethical and fair for everyone.
These are the core values that guide my team's work. These values reflect our commitment to users, our team, and the community. They serve as our guiding principles, shaping our decisions and design processes.
Positive Culture
Cultural Sensitivity: We commit to respecting cultural differences and diverse needs in our design, understanding that our products often bring together diverse groups of people.
Sustainability & Well-being: We strive for environmentally friendly designs and products that enhance users' well-being. This includes emotional considerations like reducing user anxiety, respecting negative emotions, and promoting safe practices.
Respect: We cultivate a respectful, positive work environment promoting open communication, collaboration, mutual respect, and a healthy work-life balance. We celebrate achievements, encourage feedback, and value diverse skills and perspectives.
Ethical Leadership & Emotional Intelligence: We lead by example, demonstrating ethical behavior, transparency, and fairness. We understand and manage our emotions, creating a harmonious, productive work environment.
User First
Transparency: We commit to transparent, honest, and fair design decisions, clear communication, and avoid misleading interfaces or biases. This includes fully informing users about product functions, benefits, potential risks, terms, and conditions.
Privacy & Anti-Fraud: We uphold the privacy and data security of our users, using secure technologies and practices to protect their information. We also design features to prevent and identify fraudulent activities, enhancing the integrity and trustworthiness of our platform.
Responsibility & Responsiveness: We hold ourselves accountable for our designs, learning from and improving our products based on user feedback and societal needs. We actively listen and respond to user feedback in a timely manner.
Digital Equity: We pledge to design a product that is accessible and usable across a range of devices and internet speeds, ensuring that users in areas with less technological infrastructure are not disadvantaged.
Inclusivity: We prioritize understanding, empathizing, and designing for the needs and experiences of diverse users, ensuring our designs are accessible, inclusive, and beneficial to all.
Continuous Improvement
Adaptability: We balance innovative pursuits with careful consideration of their impacts. Our designs and systems are adaptable, scalable, and reliable.
Learning: We create a culture of continuous learning, testing, improvement, and 'failing forward'. We utilize rapid prototyping to test, learn, and iterate faster, encouraging the freedom to explore various ideas.
Ideation: We stimulate innovative thinking by encouraging the fusion of diverse ideas, drawing inspiration from various disciplines, and fostering collaborative creativity.
AI Responsibility
Transparency: We commit to documenting our processes and learnings comprehensively from inception through completion, ensuring transparency in our AI-assisted workflows. We actively share our discoveries and methodologies with others, creating a foundation of collective knowledge that elevates the entire community and gives others a strategic advantage.
Bias Mitigation: We actively guard against both human and AI biases in our decision-making processes. We are aware of AI sycophants by deliberately prompting for disagreement and alternative perspectives. We avoid the sunk cost fallacy by being willing to start over when necessary, and we prevent framing effects by crafting neutral prompts that don't suggest predetermined answers. For AI bias mitigation, we seek second opinions from multiple models, remain vigilant about context drift by clearing memory when appropriate, and encourage AI systems to ask clarifying questions before drawing conclusions.
Ideation: We strategically separate ideation from execution, using AI to enhance our thinking capacity rather than replace human judgment. We transform concepts into testable experiments and leverage artificial intelligence to free up mental bandwidth for higher-order thinking, creativity, and strategic decision-making.
Responsible Use: We maintain ethical standards in all our AI interactions, ensuring our prompts and instructions uphold our core values and respect human dignity. We take personal responsibility for understanding and adhering to AI usage policies, recognizing that it is our duty to read, comprehend, and follow these guidelines rather than relying on others to interpret them for us.
Leadership
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
My approach to leadership is to align work with purpose, create a shared vision across organizational lines, and not just give lip-service to empowerment, but take practical steps towards individual growth and leadership.
Purpose-Driven Work
Aligning work with purpose is essential to building high-performing teams and combating burn-out. It is leadership’s responsibility to help teams identify and define their purpose for themselves.
Intrinsic Motivation
Purpose cannot be handed down, it has to come from within. Individuals and teams need to own and define it for themselves for it to be internalized.
This type of work will never happen on it's own, leaders must prioritize and create space for teams to define their purpose.
Rituals
1:1s
Meet people where they are, identify and track motivations, and set purposeful goals.
Purpose to Principles Ceremony
At the start of a new year, I conduct a series of workshops to define/refine our purpose as a team. As facilitator I try to identify patterns and curate the strongest themes.
Year over year we refine our purpose to principles as the team evolves and needs change.
Retrospectives
Project and quarterly retros are good times to reflect on alignment and progress towards our goals.
Consistency
Any kind of team mottos or catchphrases are gold. Providing immediate feedback in the form of shout-outs and Slack messages also go a long way for reinforcing our purpose.
Positive Work Culture
Psychological safety, mutual respect and trust are not a given, it is earned through your behaviors. Go out of your way to help others, be an advocate for your team, and be open about your own vulnerabilities to build up those factors over time.
Be proactive in celebrating wins and showing appreciation. Positive feedback is just as, if not more important than critical feedback.
Keep it chill. Pay attention to stressors, take a beat to huddle up, determine the root cause, and make a plan as a team to overcome them.
References:
Creating a Shared Vision
“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.”
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Where are we going? What are we working towards? Many organizations struggle with these questions. Design is a superpower when it comes to communicating a vision. We have a unique ability to not just conceptualize but also visualize the future.
Prototyping
“A prototype is worth a 1000 meetings.”
So much time is wasted talking about ideas. Don't wait for permission, don't wait for prioritization, just build it.
Most non-designers have a hard time picturing it without seeing it. Prototypes are crucial in the early stages of creating a shared vision for giving stakeholders context and an opportunity to provide feedback.
As the vision becomes more solidified prototypes and proofs of concept act as the picture on the puzzle box, helping teams breakdown complex problems into individual pieces.
Leverage the strengths of generative AI to express your ideas. As we enter a new technological era, every company is scrambling to figure out what the future of their business will be. Designers are uniquely poised to envision that future.
Vision-Work
User Needs & Innovation Workshops
When a team is unsure of it's vision, this a good first step into getting teams thinking about the future, without getting bogged down by implementation details. Identify emergent themes to explore further.
Demos
When working with remote and international teams, recording and sharing demos can help amplify your vision. Luck is preparation meets opportunity, record a demo of your prototypes and poc's to stay ready when opportunities to inform the roadmap arise.
Decks & Case Studies
Let's be real, the primary output of exec-level leadership is putting things in decks. Fast track alignment by outlining your vision in the form of a deck or case study so senior leaders can easily disseminate your vision.
Nemawashi
The art of consensus building. Don't let your vision get railroaded by execs with their own agenda. Loop them in before decision-making ceremonies to gain agreement and voice their concerns.
References:
Empowering Individuals
It's one thing to atol the virtues of empowerment, it's another to put it into practice. Empowerment is a tricky thing to pull off. Many leaders' efforts backfire when they try to force it on individuals who are either unprepared or unwilling.
Empowerment is more than lip service—it’s about creating the conditions for people to do their best work and grow.
Practical Approaches
Two Types of Workers
Those who know how to do good work, but are not motivated.
Those who are motivated to do good work, but don't know how.
Three Emotional Needs
Competence: Provide training, mentorship, and clarity through a well defined process and vision.
Relatedness: Understand your team's intrinsic motivations. Connect work to purpose.
Autonomy: Let doers be deciders. Fine tune control as individuals gain competence and clarity. Establish a foundation of mutual trust and pride of ownership.
Motivation
There are many models of behavior, but I defer to Fogg model (Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Prompt) for it's simplicity.
If it's too much work, find ways to lower the bar, aka ability.
If they just need a push, establish reminders or triggers, aka prompts.
If there is zero motivation, take the time to understand why and come up with a plan together to evaluate and make the best of the situation.
Overcoming Learned Helplessness
Utilize these approaches to overcome mindsets that have been poisoned by systems of control and compliance.
Make the Permanent > Temporary
Complete; don't continue
Use time-bound strategies to regroup before proceeding
Make the Personal > Impersonal
Observe; don't judge
Focus on the situation, behavior, and impact
Make the Pervasive > Isolated
Provide context
Call a timeout to address negative feedback loops
Freedom & Innovation
Designers are not just ticket takers. No one is going to instruct you to go out and innovate. But that is exactly what business need to stay relevant.
Set aside time to experiment and share ideas as a team.
Involve other departments in your experiments to drive cross-org innovation.