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.
