Spoiler: it depends.

My struggle with the product design process, how I stopped obsessing and embraced ambiguity.

5 min read

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2025

When I started my career in product design, I craved clarity. Give me the perfect process, a checklist, best practices—I’ll do it! So when designers kept saying their design process “depended,” I felt both confused and a little annoyed. How can a process… depend?

I just wanted someone to say, “here’s the process, now do it”. But design said, “lol, nah”.

Moonpig’s Double Diamond process

At first, I stuck to our company’s Double Diamond framework (pictured above). But not every project fits neatly into a few diamonds, and so the diamonds exploded (I guess technically not possible since diamonds are the hardest substance on earth, but you get it).

Suddenly, every project was a maze. Should I user test this? Conduct a JTBD interview? Cry into Figma?

So I did what any designer would do: turn my existential crisis into a design problem.🕵️‍♀️ Problem statement & scope? Check.

☕ Interview users (aka other designers)? Done.

🧠 Insights? “It depends.” (Again??)

This is when I thought, “am I... the problem?”. I realised the frameworks weren’t the issue, but rather my fixation on finding the ‘best’ process. I was designing for certainty, not clarity.

It was time to put the ‘how’ on the back burner and start asking ‘why’.

Let’s zoom out

I began to understand types of problems. The matrix below helped me to consider risk and what we know about the problem.

Unknown problem + high risk? Go deep with discovery.
Known problem + low risk? Ship fast and learn.
Known problem + high risk? Targeted validation.

That matrix became my friend. But eventually, I noticed something else creeping in: logic was killing the vibe. It was time to bring a little chaos back.

Lead with curiosity

I went back to my startup roots and re-read The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick to refine my research style.

I focused on learning about past behaviours, asking better questions and let people ramble. And so the quality of insights? Much better, yay!

Logic + creativity = it’s complicated

Time to let loose. I started drawing inspiration outside of product designer: museum art, movies I watched over the weekend, or even random conversations with friends.

But of course, sooner than later, I began longing for new strategies. I turned to Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy, where Mr. Sutherland reminded me that...

In the trivial details;

In the opposite of a good idea;

In giving free peanuts or adding a mirror in an elevator to skew time perception.

Magic often lives in the irrational;

So, what about now?

I’m still iterating (obvi). But I no longer feel the need to have a rigid process. I aim for adaptive confidence. I keep a wide range of tools under my belt, assess the nature of the problem, and stay open to a little chaos.

Nowadays, when someone asks about my design process, I laugh a little and say, “it depends.”

Because it does. And that’s the fun part.

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