Process & design thinking with double diamond

Welcome to the Product Bakery. My name is Christian and I'm here today with my co-host Alex and we thought to try out a new format today and have like a little top of our mind conversation about a topic that one of us is preparing. And today's my turn and I was just thinking, Alex, double diamond, what's the first thing that comes to your mind? Two diamonds, one behind the other. And both very expensive. What do you want to hear about double diamonds? Recently a coaching session with the product team and we were brainstorming and nailing actually brainstorming is the wrong word. We were defining the product processes and at some point while we were defining those, the VP product, she just looked at it and said, yeah, that's just a double diamond process. And I was like, not directly. So I was just curious to hear what are your experiences with working in such a double diamond environment? Have you ever developed or defined some processes around it and wanted to have an open chat with you about it? I guess double diamonds is probably something everyone has come across when they start looking into design thinking, right? It's probably one of the keys and the key processes of design thinking. And I think as this is a podcast and we can't like really show how the double diamond looks like, I would draw it on a whiteboard. By the end, it's pretty much two squares turned 45 degrees in a row. And I think what it shows you or what it's supposed to symbolize is the way you diverge and converge information, ideas, and so on. And I think like usually you would look at like the two diamonds, the first part being the research part and the second part kind of being the design part, if we look at it like this. And then again, you have it, you always have the analysis at the beginning or the ideation at the beginning, like the diversion, and then you have the synthesis in terms of converging. But I think the first thing that comes to my mind is that in general, it's never really a one directional way. So it's not like that you diverge, converge, diverge, converge, and then you launch something. So it's not all research, synthesis, ideation, and it's life. So I think it's generally just something that you can look at different phases in a row. And I do prefer looking at it more as a certain cycles. And you can, depending on the information that you have, like in an initial phase, it might be that you need more information, depending on the synthesis, it might be that you move forward into kind of the design phase, or that you have to go back again into this discovery phase. So I think like, for me, it's just, yeah, you can loop through all the different stages multiple times. And then sometimes you have to, so it's not like really a very directional phase. And just like to brain dump, another thought is that obviously, because you asked if I used it in some processes, and I think like where obviously, it's kind of part of the design process in general, because you always try to have a diverging, converging, diverging, converging. One thing where you see it really clear is also when you look at design sprint, for example. And yeah, I think we've run multiple design sprints where we tried to stick to design thinking specifically, and therefore to the double diamonds, but happy to answer any more detailed questions. Yeah, I was also because you very lovely explained how the double diamond looks like, first of all, if you just visualize it. But something that I've noticed, I was having a workshop and while we were trying to understand what each step in each processes are that needs to be taken in order to research a topic and deliver a topic and define a topic and go back, etc. I just realized, if you look at this double diamond on pictures, it usually looks equal, right? So each diamond has the same size. But I realized, depending on your domain, and the company you are working in, and the market, etc. It very often happens that maybe one diamond is bigger than the other or one is smaller than the other. So sometimes you have a much bigger phase in discovery, while on the second part, if you have the ideation and implementation phase, there's a much less to do or the other way around in very regulated environments, for example, in banking or fintech, you have smaller or shorter research cycles, while you have much more time to spend on validating prototypes and implementing those. I think it's like not a simple thing that you can just dump on the process and say, okay, we're going to introduce or implement a double diamond system. And it's just set. I think it always requires to go deep into it and understand, okay, how much time do we want to spend? What kind of steps and transition policies do we have inside the related diamond, which could be, for example, discovery, and then afterwards delivery, if you look at these both, and yeah, make sure that we really fit it to our company needs and not just trying to throw a framework onto a process within a company and saying, hey, this is a best practices or business standard that we're going to use and it will work because it won't. Yeah. And I think here really comes in that it is not this linear process. I think you should not look at the two diamonds of, okay, this is the amount of effort depending on size or also the direction. I think it's really something where I would say it's usually fluid, right? Like you see, okay, what are like all the insights that we have? Let's try and like really specify it. Do we have enough insights to specify it? Maybe we need to go back and actually go more into the empathy phase where you try to understand the user and therefore it's never really linear. And I think I will show your presentation or maybe we can share it at one point. Design thinking in general is not linear. If you would have to draw it on a graph, it's a mess. Absolutely. And the earlier you are in the process, the less linear it is. And this is also like where the divergent converging phases come into play. But I think what's important to remember is you first have the research part to try to understand the users. You try to specify the user needs, which is then the converging phase. At the end, you really should have the insights that go into the next phase. And then you pretty much explore different possibilities. You do the prototyping, you then show it to users, you try to get to validate it, to analyze it. And this is where you either then have a solution or you have to go back again and you explore different possibilities. And I think what's interesting here, as I'm saying it, I think when we talk about like the validation phase itself, once you have a prototype, is again the first diamond, right? Because like you tried to diverge to get to really understand the user. And then again, you need to converge to make the synthesis of the research. And so as you can see, it's like really, it's multiple different loops that you can tie one behind the other, depending on the outcome of the previous one. Yeah, I really like how you summarized the whole process in a nutshell with its complicated step that eventually can happen inside. And to maybe go one level higher, what I was faced with a couple of days ago was the fact to set up such a process and to first of all understand, okay, why we need to understand the customer needs. We have, for example, transition policies that require that we sync each other with, for example, a stakeholder department such as risk or I don't know, sales or compliance, whatever, because you cannot move forward inside the design thinking process if you do not have the big picture of all requirements that are also impacting the customers. And my message here is to everyone who is trying to set up such a process or working within a process, make sure that you try to get the big picture, not only around the customer itself, also the people who are interfering with those and also the departments you are working with and make sure you have transition policies, because otherwise you mess up the process because you move further. You start, for example, creating the prototype at the end of the diamond, and then you realize, okay, we need to go back, but not because you had gathered more insights, just because you realized you have forgot to gather information that should have been relevant in first place. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think then when diverging, it's, as you say, not only the user feedback, it can be feedback from different departments, feedback from different experts and so on. And especially if you look at even shorter, which also brings us back to the design sprint, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's where I wanted to wrap it up, because there, sometimes you don't have like users directed there at the beginning, or you did some user research and you have an expert kind of presenting it to the group. And then you try to have all the different information from stakeholders, from experts, from users and so on. And you define it to go into this final kind of solution definition part of the double diamond. Well said. Great, Alex. I think it was a good refresher by reminding that it's not just a single sided sword. So you have always two things to look at, not only because it's a double diamond, but also to make sure you start from the very high level and understand what is the domain you're working in, what are the processes, what are the departments. And as you just said, also making sure that you will never, ever have all information in first place, but make sure that you can work with it and go through the process. Yeah. And I think never be too religious about a process that's out there, right? It always comes down to your very specific problem, to your very specific use case, circumstances, and so on. Different teams, different problems might need different processes to get to a solution. It's good to just keep in mind, generally speaking, how, and again, what I like about the double diamond is that it shows the amount of possibilities, the amount of information, the amount of solutions in diverging it and converging it, right? So that you start with a little, you go broad, and then you go narrow again, and you do this twice. But more than showing this amount of information or dots, you should really just like keep it open and find what works for you. Don't be religious, people and interactions over processes and tools. Amazing. So we can close with the angel manifesto. I think we're good to go. And last but not least, in case you liked this episode, feel free to follow us on social media and share this episode with your colleagues, with your network. We appreciate if you would support us. And with that, have a good day. Thanks, Christian. Talk to you soon. Bye bye. Bye.