DEVOPSdigest

In today's push to launch faster, speed often takes precedence. But this only works if you're building the right product for your customers. Too often, the design phase of the product development lifecycle is rushed or reduced to UI mockups. When done right, this phase is where the success of your product is ultimately determined.

The design phase is not just about look and feel. It's about deeply understanding your customers, gathering and analyzing insights, and aligning and collaborating with cross-functional teams. It's also about setting your engineers up to build something meaningful because when teams are grounded in insight and purpose, quality follows.

In my experience, these five best practices elevate the design phase from a checkbox to a strategic advantage, and they've made a measurable impact for the products I've helped deliver.

1. Start with insightful customer conversations

Successful design starts with listening, not guessing. That means conducting qualitative interviews with a wide range of customers and compiling research across customer types, vertical markets, regions, and use cases to gain useful insight. Learn what problems they are trying to solve, pain points, workflows, and how they are using (or not using) other solutions. And this isn't something one or two product managers can do alone.

Also, collaborate with UX researchers to craft open-ended questions that draw out deeper insights. The better the input, the more likely you are to build something people need, want, and will buy.

2. Share customer insights throughout the organization

Customer feedback loses value when it's siloed. Research findings should be brought to key stakeholders in the business and shared widely, and that's not just the product team, but includes UX, engineering, sales, marketing, support, and leadership. Everyone involved in building, promoting, and supporting the product needs to understand the "why" behind the vision of what you are building.

By making these insights available across teams, you also build alignment. Engineers better appreciate why they're being asked to build a product when solving a specific problem, encouraging creativity, commitment, and quality.

3. Build meaningful relationships with design partner programs

There's true value in forming one-on-one partnerships with select customers throughout the design and development cycle. These design partner relationships create a trusted feedback loop, helping customers feel heard while allowing product teams to validate product direction early and often.

Naturally, these valuable relationships deepen over time. Customers see their input influence the product, creating loyalty and a sense of ownership. Product teams get honest, continuous feedback that helps them align priorities, uncover emerging needs, pivot quickly, and avoid costly mistakes.

4. Form Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) for valuable dialogue

While one-on-one conversations are essential, there's also great value in bringing customers together while they talk, and you listen. Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) allow you to observe customer-to-customer dialogue, often bringing insights you wouldn't get from individual interviews. Watching customers debate priorities, compare solutions, and brainstorm often reveals needs and trends you might otherwise miss.

CABs also offer an opportunity to test ideas in a more public forum while gaining buy-in from a cross-section of your user base as well as other stakeholders before moving forward with important decisions and direction.

5. Align teams through cross-disciplinary workshops

Once research is collected and shared, design workshops bring teams together to create. These productive sessions, including product, engineering, design, sales, marketing, and more, bring unique perspectives, and the collaborative environment fosters creativity you won't get elsewhere.

With exercises, brainstorming, and group voting, teams prioritize features and gain consensus on what's important. Workshops don't just generate ideas; they focus teams around solving the biggest problems in the most impactful ways. The result is clarity, buy-in, and a stronger, customer-centered minimum viable product (MVP).

The Design Phase Takes Time, But It Pays

Yes, conducting the design phase this way takes time. I understand companies feel pressure to move fast. But shipping a product that doesn't meet customer needs just to get it out the door quickly is a waste of time and money, while morale takes a hit.

I love that when you take time to invest in thorough design upfront, your engineering team builds with purpose. Your sales team sells with confidence. Marketing tells a clearer story with real user needs. Leadership gains visibility and confidence in the overall product vision. Your product enters the market with validation.

Even if you need to scale back your initial feature set to deliver an MVP, you can still create real value because your decisions are supported by solid customer insights.

Design Is Where Great Products Begin

Ultimately, the design phase isn't just about processes, mockups, or deliverables. It's about empowering your teams with the right information to make smart decisions. It's about collaboration, transparency, and autonomy. When teams are aligned around customer needs, they go the extra mile, because they believe in what they're building. This approach ultimately pays off.

Invest in the design phase. Deep customer insight and collaboration are where real product leadership happens, and great products are born.