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In countless conversations with clients and collaborators over the last 18 months, one theme has come up more than any other:
It feels like everything in the world is changing faster than ever before.
Shifting consumer sentiments, geopolitical upheaval, parabolic market swings, and the constant risk-reward calculus of AI—change is the only constant.
And while reacting to change is something a lot of organizations were already pretty good at, something about this particular moment feels different. Our conversations tell us there’s more pressure, more caution, more hypervigilance, and more heartburn.
The vanishing permission to “break things”
The reaction from many organizations to this faster, more unpredictable-feeling pace of change goes beyond just shortening timelines. For product teams, the permission to fail has seemingly gone away. The invitation to “move fast and break things” has turned into a “move fast and get it right” expectation.
- Pilots and MVPs are no longer just learning opportunities; they’re v1 of a product the business is counting on succeeding
- Innovation Days and Hackathons aren’t just playgrounds for new ideas; they’re spaces to rapidly build real, revenue-generating features
- Incubator programs are accountable for the ROI of fledgling product lines from day one; the appetite for loss leaders is gone, along with the patience to build a user base
The result? Product teams are stuck trying to move faster, navigate an unprecedented pace of change, and remain profitable at every step. And while this feels new, it’s actually what human-centered design was built to handle! It’s the foundation of models like the well-known Double Diamond.
The thing is, the design process relies on iteration and user feedback loops to prioritize and deliver these kinds of results. By its very nature, it requires being wrong sometimes (maybe even a lot of the time!) because we are not our users and we won’t get it right until we learn what they have to teach us. And learning takes time and resources we don’t always have in our current landscape of pace and change.
How do we know when to stop and listen? Or when to keep running? And when is done actually done?
This always-shifting chase for direction and results means teams sometimes reach launch day with a product that feels irrelevant or obsolete—the organization has new goals, users now want something different, or a new generative AI model has launched that promises to do it faster. Or maybe something else has changed in the market that shifts the entire context.
It’s time for a new approach
So, how do we still get all the human-centered validity we got from the Double Diamond while moving fast enough to keep the roadmap full and the dev teams busy? And how do we learn our hard lessons in safe ways so that we know what to build to keep users happy even as things change around us?
We have some ideas for a new kind of approach that can handle the realities teams face today. Ideas like:
- Continuous, open-ended listening and observation rather than a discrete discovery phase per project
- Scaled, qualitative user validation that accelerates the definition phase by leveraging new tools and technology
- An evolved ideation process that combines human creativity and generative AI
- A new method to rapidly evaluate ideas that have been generated outside the design thinking process (say, from business stakeholders)
- An established user testing cadence that allows for regular, recurring input from users to reduce timelines and overhead as products evolve
In the coming weeks we’ll share some new ideas and processes for how teams can listen and learn, apply what they already know, and keep iterating, even when things around them seem to be changing at the speed of light.
Along the way, we’ll be testing them in a real research project and sharing our experiences.
Stay tuned!
