Hack the diamond: quality with velocity
Methods for building well-crafted, user driven products; fast
🤦🏼♀️ Good, Fast, Cheap
It’s an age old problem:
In Product Design, the double diamond has long been the holy grail of design thinking:
Interweaving human-centered design (HCD) principles into your product development process has many benefits. You center user needs and start with an open curiosity for better understanding user problems, rather than jumping to assumption-based solutions.
This works even better when you have a strong cross-functional approach to product development, with deep collaboration across Product Marketing (PMM), Product Management (PM), Product Design (PD), Engineering, Data Science (DS) and User Research (UXR).
However, what do you do when your HCD process fails to scale with your organization and design process is cited as a hit to velocity?
I’ll share some of the best methods I’ve developed for balancing these tensions in my 12+ years working as a Service, Product Designer & Design Leader.
These tools and resources will hopefully help you:
- Add in some buffer for product & design in sequencing roadmap work
- Build a healthy backlog
- Save team time by grouping work into logical buckets and reducing context switching
- Develop expertise within clear work-streams
- Reduce the number of reviews/approvals, as shipped features are tightly scoped and iteratively measured
These are some of the many ways you can develop product strategy, team culture and uphold the quality bar as a designer.
🔨 Themed roadmapping
Complete the Discovery & Define phases by product theme
When you have a meaty roadmap or are trying to build a brand new product from 0–1, bucket strategic work according to theme/user need.
Structuring your roadmap into themes, as opposed to features, can unlock team velocity by kicking off discovery and concepting for numerous features/streams of work at once.
Time-box this effort so you’re not churning in endless research and ideation. And flag what hypotheses, ideas need further investigation before the team kicks off solutioning.
This may include: upfront research, consumer insights and data analysis, journey maps, sketches, concept validation.
Learn more about themed based roadmapping here.
After theme discovery, narrow in on various Solutions to your theme and sequence them according to business impact, user need, effort, etc.
🔧 Dual Track Agile
Develop & Deliver one feature at a time
Develop, Deliver and Build your solution into iterative features with design and eng sprints.
This may include: MVP eng-only improvements, A/B tests, usability testing, iterative design releases, healthy backlogs with eng and design debt (UX polishes, experiences scoped out of the MVP).
Learn more about dual track agile for design. And for OKRs.
🛠️ Put it together: themed sprints
By combining these two methods, you can complete the first phase of the double diamond (Discover, Define) for a theme, and then sequence out the second phase (Develop, Deliver) into sprints.
Sequencing and sizing is key, as well as time-boxing your product, UXR & design sprints just as you would an eng sprint. And it’s ok if things take a week or so longer than originally costed (just like engineering efforts) — just so long as you have a healthy backlog of bugs, polish items, infrastrature investments (more on that in a minute).
It’s like product mitosis:
This approach isn’t a fit for every product/problem, but it can especially help when teams feel like they have too many simultaneous, large projects going at once. It helps you de-risk a big strategic bet by breaking it into smaller iterations that you can measure and develop more quickly. It also has the benefit of connecting the why of numerous small projects back to a larger strategic effort, user pain or business goal.
No Handoff (dual-track plus) is another great method for continuous discovery and development.
What’s important here is that you’re not doing agile for agile’s sake, but rather thoughtfully adopting philosophies and processes that help you deliver value to users:
“Agile is not about delivering software. It isn’t a methodology with a rule book that we can follow in order to push my products forwards.
Instead — Agile is a Philosophy about enabling positive customer change that drives business value….
In Agile — we need to value our individuals and the interactions over our processes and tools that we’ve brought in.” — James Whitman, Stop ‘delivering’ software with Agile — it doesn’t work
DesignMap has an excellent Flexible Design Framework for non-linear design thinking focused on outcomes, not outputs.
🗺️ Map your process with your team
We all hold different assumptions on how product is best developed based on our unique training, work experiences. The worst thing you can do on a squad is never discuss these assumptions. Misalignment leads to frustration, clashes and decreased efficiency.
Ask your team: How have you built product in your career? What processes did you like, dislike? What should our process be?
Mapping out your process can be incredibly valuable, and should only take about an hour. It’ll help identify gaps (don’t forget QA!) and align everyone on how you’ll ideally work together, expected timelines.
Here’s an example from a high-paced growth squad I was working on, across numerous squads and PMs:
Rules are meant to be broken, but having an ideal process mapped helps your team be consciously aware of what steps you’re merging, skipping, and why.
🧰 Effective cross-functional collaboration
How can people from different functions, backgrounds and cultures effectively work together to build innovative, quality products at a healthy pace that unlocks value for the business? 😳
I recommend sitting down with your cross-functional peers and asking one another: How should we work together?
Review the below metaphorical approaches to collaboration and discuss their trade-offs with your team. Perhaps you want to try one approach, then retro and try another.
What’s most important is having the discussion — because if one person thinks they’re in a parallel race while another thinks they’re in a relay race — you’re gonna crash and burn.
Approach 1: It’s a parallel race
What this might look like:
PM, Design, Eng, PPM, UXR, DS run their own parallel tracks of work.
How a project is started:
After Project Kick-off, UXR leads discovery while Design leads concepting while Eng leads technical investigation.
How a project is carried out:
Each phase of the project/diamond represents a moment in time across all tracks of work.
- Status updates, reviews written and presented by one lead (PM or Eng), summarizing all tracks.
Pros: Everyone can move at their own pace; potential for multiple streams of work.
Cons: Teams may fall out of rhythm / product, design may be stuck running multiple tracks at the same time. Requires lots of coordination and oversight (ideally, but rarely the case: a project manager).
Approach 2: It’s a relay race
What this might look like:
PM, Design, Eng, PPM, UXR, DS hand-off each piece/phase of work by function.
How a project is started:
After Project Kick-off, UXR leads discovery → Design leads concepting → Eng leads technical investigation → etc.
How a project is carried out:
Each phase of the project/diamond represents a hand-off in the relay race.
- Status updates, reviews written and presented by the lead who is responsible for that phase.
Pros: Teams move quickly with clear milestones, steps ahead; everyone is accountable for their piece.
Cons: One team member may be stuck waiting for the next; may lack context from the prior phase of work.
Approach 3: It’s a dance
What this might look like:
PM, Design, Eng, PPM, UXR, DS all work together as an integrated unit — collaborating closely — like dna cells (aka role-blending).
How a project is started:
After Project Kick-off, UXR (or PM, Design) leads discovery & concepting with Design, PM, Eng — each contributing their perspective based on expertise.
How a project is carried out:
Each phase of the project/double diamond represents a convergence of the functions — with the latest point of view of each team lead summarized.
- Status updates, reviews written and presented collaboratively by all leads.
Pros: Everyone is in sync, at all times.
Cons: Requires close collaboration, communication — this approach may not fit everyone’s working style.
Tips for strong xfn collaboration regardless of approach
Operate as one team/ one project
- If you’re in the office: sit by one another.
- Tackle roadmap items together — know when each project is being kicked-off, share learnings as you go.
- Have Monday team leads syncs — share priorities for the week/sprint ahead & the following week/sprint.
- Set project milestones ahead of time when project planning, update them as needed in your weekly syncs.
- Use those milestones to align stakeholders on timelines/ what’s coming next. (Asana is a great tool for this.)
- Take time to understand how your colleagues are being measured, what their priorities are.
Follow Conscious Leadership principles, such as:
- Don’t be afraid to have hard conversations. Disagreeing can often yield productive results.
- Create and cultivate trust with each other.
- Hold high standards for yourself and others — clear is kind.
Do a team prologue
Your team has the biggest influence on whether you love coming to work each day. Establish team empathy, norms by doing a team prologue where you share your various working styles.
Another, fun activity is to make trading cards for everyone on your team:
💬 Make crit inclusive
It will save you a lot of back and forth, games of telephone to invite your team to crit for a project you’re actively working on. Invite them to listen in with video, audio off during the design critique, or have them participate fully after sharing cultural and feedback guidelines.
If your design org doesn’t have such guidelines, here’s a few I’ve found most useful:
Establish a crit & review culture.
Co-create these with your team and/or designers, or borrow from below. Crit cultures should reflect your company values, and help carve space for creative and psychological safety within your team.
Align on share goals for giving feedback.
Learning how to give good feedback is a craft, and takes study and practice like any other skill. These are some helpful tips my colleague Lauren Dash and I provided to our design org at a small start up:
Earmark each piece of feedback as a Do, a Try, or a Consider.
This helps prevent the loudest or most senior voices’ feedback from carrying the most weight. It also helps the feedback provider prioritize their thoughts and generate constructive next steps:
🪵 Develop a design backlog
Almost nothing gets built exactly as we designed it, and there’s always trade-offs, compromises to be made along the way.
Start ticketing out these decisions: the ideal version took 2 weeks to build, so you went with a less elegant, simpler version. There wasn’t time for the micro-interactions you designed. There’s polish to an existing experience you’d like to add. Hand off your designs according to P0, P1, P2 — but still ticket the P2 items and add them to a design backlog your team can pull from at any time.
Design backlogs are great for:
- onboarding new engineers
- filling gaps in-between product/design and engineering sprints
- making a “polish sprint” where the team invests in product quality
- a change of pace during an off-sprint, or when an engineer wants to learn something new/ have some variety in their day
🔩 Scrappy, DIY UXR for the whole team
Usability testing/validation is often the first thing to get cut from a project plan. But this can be very shortsighted, as it can save countless eng hours, product and design debt down the line.
While UXR-led research is always preferred, I’ve developed a scrappy/hacky DIY method that Product Designers can use to involve the entire team in getting just enough insights from 3–5 participants. Less recruitment, this method takes only one week and can be done all in one figjam file.
Step 1: Conduct the Research
- Develop your research plan, script
- Assign notetakers, observers for each session — including engineers, stakeholders
- Conduct the research — if you’re less experienced in facilitation, I recommend reading: Being the Crystal Goblet
- Using this figjam template — have team members take notes directly into the post-its.
- Immediately after each session, summarize the key takeaways, insights.
Step 2: Synthesize
- Hold a synthesis session — 1–2 hours long, invite your whole team
- Have team members select a column in the above research notes and mark themselves as a Synthesizer. (This can be a session they participated in, or not).
- 30 minutes: Synthesizers take their stickies and convert to sentiments.
- Using this figjam template — go through one question at a time and have Synthesizer share their findings — map this to the corresponding UI and/or question.
- Discuss next steps, action items together.
To recap, these methods have have helped me deliver quality products with high-velocity teams:
- 🔨 Themed roadmapping — Complete the Discovery & Define phases by product theme.
- 🔧 Dual Track Agile — Develop & Deliver one feature at a time.
- 🛠️ Put it together: themed sprints — Combine the two above methods.
- 🗺️ Map your process with your team — Identify assumptions and align on your ideal process.
- 🧰 Effective cross-functional collaboration — How does your team want to work together? Are you in a parallel race, a relay race, or a dance? Do a team prologue and/or make team baseball cards.
- 💬 Make crit inclusive — Establish guidelines on how to give constructive feedback.
- 🪵Develop a design backlog — Ticket out P2 designs, polish items so that your team can iteratively improve your product quality.
- 🔩 Scrappy, DIY UXR for the whole team — Validate your designs as a team in 1 week.
All methods are a team effort — discuss them with your cross-functional peers. What other methods have they tried, learned from in their careers?
Teams that experiment with process and pull from industry best practices are often the most effective and efficient in their craft.
I hope these methods help you and your teams’ work feel more productive and enjoyable.
Good luck out there ❤️.
