Ways to deliver

Outcome

TBD in “Discovery”. Elevating ethical business growth, team capabilities, and product with a suitable mix of design approaches.

Key result examples

* Coach juniors to advance in senior roles
* Decrease design-related blockers by 25%
* Find 3 good design candidates with TA
* Aid decision-making with a design sprint

benefits

Successful design relies on choosing the right tools, approaches, and principles for the problem at hand. Often, this starts with Discovery.

Some design-adjacent challenges are resolved with simple hallway talks. Others, with benchmarking and research. And in some cases, co-designing a wireframe is exactly what’s needed.

Approaches

A relevant, efficient mix of e.g.

  • Setting design-adjacent, ethical goals

  • Measuring success with metrics

  • Coaching and asking clarifying questions

  • Co-design workshops; design sprints

  • Communicating design; DesignOps

  • Enforcing various industry standards

  • CX/UX/UI/Content design

  • Design support for marketing & sales

Throughout my career, I have been often asked to “create a mockup”. While there is a time and place for UI craft, it’s just a small piece of what design can offer.

Design is a powerful strategic lense – similar to finances and tech. I’ve used design tactics as a freelancer, a coach for 150+ product enthusiast, a co-founder and a CEO.

Valeria Gasik, Will & Way
Applied design methods to e.g. retain 10’000 happy clients during pricing model change; co-build a pitch story leading to 10 Mio investment; and establish company-wide “customer-centric culture”.

How does this work?

The “Delivery” is a mix of known and custom design approaches and activities, tailored for the selected problem-to-solve for strategy, team, ops and practice.

1. Strategic design

Design begins in exec meetings. The strategic design supports the team on all levels – from setting clear and ethical objectives, choosing impactful tactics and priorities, complying with standards (accessibility, sustainability, DEI), and defining success metrics beyond MRR and NPS.

2. Design for teams

Our theme map for the healthy product company.

Will 🤟

Steering people with talks and workshops to design services together, towards a shared goal

Enthusiasm 🌟

Coaching and supporting people with design – in a way that fits their roles and ambitions

Trained leadership ⚓️

Empowering decision-makers to lead in-house and external  work

Access 🌴

Enabling product makers’ access to decisions, budget, people and tech with smooth design operations (DesignOps)

3. Design Ops

Design operations (DesignOps) is the “grey matter” of design-adjacent work that helps people advance with design, together, well. It’s an umbrella term for all the (often) invisible work that nudges things forward, such as smoothing communication and lobbying for access.

4. Practical design

Setting the base for in-house and/or external work.

Customer Experience (CX) 🦚
empathy maps, customer journey…

User experience (UX) 👑
archetypes, scenarios, user stories, flows…

User Interface (UI) 💻
wireframes, Figma prototypes, comp-lib…

Content & comms 😎
copy, storytelling, pitches, plans…