My process,research to shipped product
Five steps I run on every project, from a fintech onboarding to a game feature. The order stays the same. How long each step takes depends on how much we already know.
Discover
What is really going on?
Talk to users, read the data, map the market and the business constraints.
Define
Which problem is worth solving?
Turn findings into one sharp problem, a target user and a metric we will move.
Design
What could it look like?
Explore wide, then converge: flows, wireframes, prototypes, system components.
Validate
Does it work for real people?
Usability tests before code and experiments after, so we cut risk before we scale.
Ship
Live, and measured.
Pair with engineering through build and QA, launch, and track the metric from step 02.
Discovery runs in parallel
A kickoff with goals and stakeholders feeds three parallel evidence streams, qualitative, quantitative and market. Synthesis turns them into patterns, and a gate decides whether the evidence is strong enough to prioritise, or whether we go back and fill the gaps first.
Research doesn't stop at step two
Where my time goes across a typical project. Research leads at the start, design and build take over, and research comes back to measure what we shipped.
Shipped isthe next research
- MeasureLaunch metrics and session data show what changed, and what didn't.
- LearnThe gaps become new questions for the next Discover round.
- RepeatEach cycle starts with more evidence, so it moves faster.