Designing is imagining

An outcome that you and your team is trying to affect is probably fairly static, say, reducing the bureaucratic burden on the public. But how you get there is not, and it changes based on your assumptions, data, successes, funding, failures, ability to convince people, ability to make quality products, and so on. The work you’re doing in a digital product team is about going from A to B.

I often see teams act as if all that they should be doing is thinking only about the things they can build straight away. Making sketches of future things is deemed as a waste of time, rather than being recognised as an integral part of making these futures a reality. I think that this is mental. Telling compelling stories of what you’re exploring and thinking about - to your users, to your stakeholders, to whoever listens - is one of the most important tools you have to build your agency, even if a million things need to happen for you to make these stories come true.

Good designers tend to be great at this, and can seamlessly navigate between the here and now and the ridiculously far-fetched. There is a practice that I use to make teams comfortable with it, which I wanted to share: time lenses. I ask the teams that I work with to think about at least three different types of design work, based on when it’ll be possible to actually make it real:

• The here and now. You want the work here to be tidy, considered, tested, feasible. You want the entire team to develop them with you in an iterative loop with your users. Twists and turns are encouraged as you learn more along the way but they will be managed, because of how many people need to be swimming in the same direction for it to work
• The soon after. This is how you influence what’s on the roadmap. Show a sketch in a show and tell. Share an idea that you’ve seen done well elsewhere. You want a fair few of these on the go, and they probably span everything from feature iteration to new propositions. Your audience is probably the team. Catalogue them neatly. Most might not go anywhere. At worst, they will help the team state the road not travelled, and at best influence what you make
• The future. Oh this is anything goes territory. Imagine AGI. Imagine mass adoption of digital identity. Imagine the entire UK public sector is onboard. Show what you’d want to do with that. Equip your directors with this. Caveat it heavily. Be careful with how you’re showing it: design output at this stage is very risky, and you really don’t want people getting the wrong idea about what’s actually possible. But, if you want to make big change, you need to think big, and take risks

It’s a useful framework: it takes a vague, instinctive thing I’ve been doing and codifies it. As your ambition and the rate of technological progress increases, working like this will only get more useful. It helps show that there are different modes of operating for a team. I don’t think you should be working in a tight-knit design-test-iterate-build loop for an entire year. I don’t think you should be daydreaming for a full either year. A good team needs to recognise which to do when, and navigate between them constantly.