Double diamond framework: A user-centered approach to building products.
Updated: Oct 8
Any product team on a 0 to n build journey is constantly faced with ONE big hairy question: WHAT TO BUILD?
Identifying the right 'WHAT TO BUILD' is paramount for any product team success. That's because once they know the right audience and problem statement to build for, delivery is a matter of implementation - a relatively objective outcome achievable by most engineering teams.
Easier said than done though.
In today's world, where there are sooooo many business personas to build for, so many problem statements and such stiff competition to stand out against, product teams can easily land into endless research loops trying to understand the market/ competition/ users and never finalize the right problem to solve, especially if they don't take a structured approach.
We think that the double diamond framework is a powerful way to structure your 0 to n product build efforts.
After all, customer obsession and user-centered design form the underpinnings of double diamond.
And any commercial product is built and paid for, mainly to solve the needs of end users.
In this post, we will go deep into the double diamond framework, and understand how you can practically benefit from it to drive user-centered product build and design.
But first, let's start by understanding the basic concept of user-centered design.
Understanding user-centered design
User-centered design is an iterative design process that focuses on understanding the needs, behaviors, and experiences of the end users.
It involves the users throughout the development process to ensure that the final product aligns with their needs and preferences.
User-centered design particularly emphasizes empathy, usability, and accessibility, making it an essential approach in today’s competitive market.
Now, on to the double diamond.
The double diamond framework
The Double Diamond framework is visually represented as two diamonds side by side, symbolizing the process of exploring an issue broadly (divergence) and then taking focused action (convergence).
Each diamond consists of two phases, forming four distinct stages: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver.
This structure continuously integrates user insights and feedback.
Phase 1: Discover
The Discover phase is about research and understanding the problem space comprehensively from the users’ perspective.
It involves divergent thinking, where the goal is to gather as much information and insight as possible.
Key activities:
User research: Conduct interviews, surveys, and observations to deeply understand user needs, behaviors, and pain points. For a 1 to n product, it helps to continuously plug into user feedback. If you are interested to learn more about the various customer feedback sources you should tap into, check out our post on "Product sense: Customer feedback sources every product manager should draw insights from?"
Market research: Analyze market trends and potential to identify opportunities and gaps.
Competitive research: Gather intelligence on competitor product capabilities and go-to-market strategies, to identify potential differentiators and value propositions.
Few practical tips:
Narrow your persona: Narrow your discovery efforts to a persona (maybe at role and industry level). This ensures you are not lost, trying to research, distill and understand the whole world whose problems you could potentially solve for.
Stay open minded: Rooted in engineering and being humans, product teams have a natural tendency to start solutioning as soon as they hear an ask or problem. Go deeper - at this stage, the idea is to ingest everything, just capture and not jump to conclusions and solutions too soon.
Engage broadly - both potential users and buyers: Involve a diverse group of users, buyers and influencing stakeholders in the research process to capture a wide range of insights.
Don't make it a waterfall: Once you identify few high impact problem statements, it's ok to set the rest of the double diamond process in motion. You can't be endlessly into discovery until you understand ALL problems of the target persona - so it's totally fair to iterate and convert into the continuous discovery mode, once you have identified the problem statements that you want to start your product's 0 to 1 journey with.
While this should give you an eagle's view, product discovery is a very deep topic.
You could continue learning it further by exploring 'continuous discovery habits', 'discovery loops', 'feedback rivers', 'continuous feedback loops' and such more topics.
Phase 2: Define
The Define phase involves synthesizing the information gathered during the Discover phase to pinpoint the core issues and opportunities.
This phase shifts from divergent to convergent thinking, focusing on defining clear and actionable persona-focused problem statements.
Key Activities:
Extracting insights: Identify themes like ideas, complaints, appreciations, compete mentions and questions from all user interactions.
Aligning on problem statements: Craft and select clear and concise problem statements to go after as a product team, that address the high value user needs and gaps.
Fine-tune ideal customer profile: Detail out different user personas, their specific needs & goals and be further clear regarding your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Few practical tips:
Synthesize thoroughly: Take the time to carefully analyze and synthesize the data collected during the Discover phase. Look for patterns and connections that may not be immediately obvious. This is where the discovery and customer insights solution from Velora AI can help a lot.
Prioritize problems: Identify and prioritize the most critical problems to address, based on user needs. Weigh customer value against business viability to ensure these efforts link to helping you drive committed product outcomes.
Create clear Problem Statements: Ensure that problem statements are clear, specific, and actionable. These will guide the subsequent phases of development.
This phase ensures that the problem is well understood and framed correctly, setting the stage for effective solution generation.
Phase 3: Develop
The Develop phase is where we start solving for the identified opportunities.
It involves another round of divergent thinking, encouraging the generation of a wide range of potential solutions.
Key Activities:
Brainstorming sessions: Generate a broad array of ideas and solution options. Map solution options on an impact vs effort matrix to choose the most effective one to proceed.
Wireframing and prototyping: Create low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes to visualize concepts.
Co-creation workshops: Collaborate with users and stakeholders to refine and enhance ideas.
Few practical tips:
Foster creativity: Create an environment that encourages all ideas and experimentation. Solutions need not be limited to technology. Often, many problems are solved by deploying people and process, and those could be fairly viable options to test the waters, and test business viability until you reach a certain scale that warrants building features in the product.
Prototype FAST: Develop low-fidelity prototypes early in the process to visualize concepts and gather feedback. Ship fast - this helps to quickly identify promising ideas, areas for improvement and any course corrections before investing a lot into product development.
Involve users: Create a community of users, who you can engage in co-creation workshops and feedback sessions from time to time to refine and enhance ideas.
Engaging users directly in the development process ensures that their feedback is integrated early and often, leading to more user-centered solutions.
Phase 4: Deliver
The Deliver phase focuses on refining and implementing the solutions identified in the Develop phase.
This involves convergent thinking, where the most promising ideas are selected, tested, and iterated upon before being finalized and launched.
Key activities:
User testing: Conduct usability tests with high-fidelity prototypes to gather feedback and identify areas for improvement.
Iteration: Refine and iterate on the product based on user feedback and testing results.
Launch planning: Prepare for the product go-to-market launch, including phase-wise rollouts, marketing strategies, support plans, and performance metrics.
Few practical tips:
Test rigorously: Conduct thorough user testing with high-fidelity prototypes to gather detailed feedback and identify usability issues.
Iterate rapidly: Although we try our best efforts to get early feedback, sometimes users grok the product better when they see the high fidelity prototypes. If this happens, some of the feedback might be surprising, and throw us back a few steps. Keep an open mind if this happens and iterate fast - the goal is to continuously refine and improve the product before launch.
Closely align with your go-to-market teams: Develop a comprehensive launch plan, chalking out all dependencies across product, marketing, sales, customer success and support along with action ownership. This will ensure that ball is not dropped by anyone on the D-day.
This phase ensures that the product is not only ready for market but also validated by users, enhancing its chances of success.
Conclusion:
The benefits of a structured approach to building products is fairly obvious.
That said, we would like to caution you before we close.
Product teams often fall into the trap of planning extensive discovery at the start of the product journey. Such projects typically look like a few months of intense research effort and landing on an MVP which drives home the initial 0 to $0.5Mn (or even $1Mn).
However, teams who don't develop product discovery into a habit and employ this double diamond kind of approaches on a continuous basis, find that the user needs evolve with time and start to diverge away from the initial understanding gathered during MVP phase.
This could be a recipe for product failure.
Teams ought to continuously stay connected with users, gather insights and their feedback regularly and keep adapting the product to deliver both customer value and business viability.
That said, it's hard to consolidate customer data continuously across so many avenues. Flash (by velora.ai) helps gather, synthesize and automate customer insights into one centralized hub for product teams, to help them build products that users love.
Coming back to closing this topic, the double diamond framework is a powerful tool for achieving user-centered products.
By guiding teams through a structured process of divergence and convergence, it ensures that products are well-researched, user-centered, and thoroughly tested before launch.
Building in close connect with the users can lead to more successful and impactful products, ultimately driving business success and enhancing customer satisfaction.
Whether you're a seasoned product person or new to the field, the Double Diamond framework offers valuable insights and strategies to navigate the complexities of product development with confidence and creativity.