This is commonly known as the "reverse double diamond" approach, an antidote to the traditional design-centric double diamond model. This approach lends itself better to lean startup methodology as it encourages arriving at MVP sooner, and performing subsequent testing and validation in a production environment with real customers instead of relying on mockups and prototypes. This approach proved doubly effective at Ninety when coupled with continuous delivery on the engineering side: we were able to ship tremendous value to customers with every sprint cycle.

In order for rapid design and continuous discovery to be effective, PDs and PMs need to be empowered to make data-driven decisions. I had to make sure we had the tooling and processes in place to make customer sentiments, session and analytics data usable by all product roles.

I worked with PM and cross-functional teams to set up pipelines to route customer support chats, interview transcripts, feature requests to a centralized repository for analysis and prioritization. I also coached the design team to triangulate these insights with session recordings, product analytics and database entries to make data-driven decisions at all stages of the design process.

At the end of the day, however, nothing can replace an actual customer conversation. I worked with PM to ensure the team was regularly conducting customer interviews, optimized processes to ensure easy outreach and scheduling, and set up a panel (dubbed “Ninety Nuts”) to maintain relationships with product evangelists.

A multi-pronged approach to customer feedback meant our team always had a wealth of qualitative and quantitative insights at our fingertips. Any decision we made was informed by data and every launch was an opportunity to collect more.

My product design philosophy is that designers ought to move beyond specialization and embrace being holistic product owners, speaking the same language as PM and engineering and make meaningful contributions at all stages of the product lifecycle. This means looking beyond visual design and research processes, and investing in areas like data analytics, frontend code literacy, stakeholder management and design advocacy.

At Ninety, I worked with each designer to identify their current strengths and opportunities for improvement, and chart a path for career growth. To that end, I leveraged a version of Artiom Dashinsky’s competencies matrix to assess designers across a range of hard and soft skills, and set quarterly goals to ensure continuous growth.

The tech landscape is rapidly evolving, and I envision a future where product design and management merges, with craft skills being augmented by AI and design systems. Product managers and engineers will find themselves empowered to design, and vice versa – designers will find themselves being able to go from idea to real-world solution much faster with the advent of low and no-code tooling. As designers, the best thing we can do to future-proof ourselves is ensure we provide value beyond just our craft.