Using design to manage risk

The conversation was swirling. The executive was trying to make a decision, but leader A and leader B were talking past each other. At first, I held back to listen…

Then I saw the underlying problem.

We had to make a decision about whether to sunset a legacy feature, but the executive didn’t have a full understanding of what the current experience of that feature looked like, and what would change. The other leaders were trying to *convince* him of their perspectives, but they were doing a poor job of explaining what the tradeoffs were.

He couldn’t assess the risk, so he couldn’t make a call.

I opened Notion and started a new table. About 15 minutes later I had a rough user journey mapped out: 6 columns, three rows: Current state, Future state A, Future state B.

It wasn’t colorful, it wasn’t fancy. It got the job done.

I grabbed 15 minutes of his time and sent the table ahead with a short explanation.

“This is exactly what I needed!” he exclaimed. We had a decision by the end of the day

As designers we forget that our tools work for us. If I had taken 2 days to make it pretty, or complicated, the opportunity to provide impact would have passed me by. What I created was discardable. No one ever looked at it again. But those 15 minutes paid dividends in time saved.

People struggle to solve a problem they can’t visualize. As designers, this is one of our super powers. Help people see the maze. Give them a map so they can find their way out.

The value of design is sometimes as simple as helping someone see what they can’t on their own.