How do we design effectively? Start with first principles: fix the Swiss cheese.

Design problems tend to arrive on my desk in familiar shapes. An organisation has a new idea or technology but is unsure how to turn it into a product. Or they have a working service that isn’t gaining traction in the market. Or they have a product but don’t have consensus about where to take it next. Whatever the situation, everyone agrees that the design needs to move forward, but the path can be unclear.

Another pattern I see is inconsistency in the team’s knowledge. In some areas they have a great deal of know-how, sometimes better than anyone else, yet there can also be big gaps. I call this Swiss cheese. The job is to collectively find the holes and fill them. Clarity breeds progress, and it’s obvious to most that this is the right place to start.

Surprisingly, though, this can be a minefield. When a team is thirsty for solutions, the last thing they want to hear are the words “research” or “analysis”. Some design teams simply dive in and treat the Swiss cheese as a client-side problem, then blame poor outcomes on an imperfect brief. Others, internally, treat it as another department’s problem. But product development can’t work like this. It needs to be a unifying force within the business. Performance is the measure of success, and if the upstream work is missing, success is unlikely.

If you're serious about creating effective products, a different course of action is necessary. Take stock of first principles, what is known and what isn’t, so you can target information gathering and execute a design programme with far more confidence. As design happens, it’s worth thinking through four key inputs and how they can be integrated into development: user needs; the proposition and business case; contexts of use; and technology. These are more than places to collect requirements; they are platforms from which to discover new ideas and innovate.

User Needs

Understanding users and their requirements can become a moving target, so work in this area needs to be treated with care if it isn’t aligned with strategic intentions. Once it is aligned, however, there’s no end to the value a clear understanding of users can bring in uncovering unmet needs and opportunities for improving products and services.

Teams can miss the nuance of what people actually want, especially if they already have a solution in mind. Confirmation bias affects us all, so understanding explicit, implicit, and latent needs can save enormous amounts of wasted energy. Who doesn’t want to minimise costly development paths that were never truly desired in the first place? Building what matters to the user just makes sense.

Proposition and Business Case

When user needs are well understood, solutions tend to flow quickly from teams. Most people enjoy solving problems; it’s one of the most rewarding parts of the process. The challenge is to test whether users actually agree with the proposition and are willing to pay for it, and whether the business is ready and well positioned to deliver it.

To do this, frameworks such as Value Proposition Design and Business Model Canvas can be effective. These tools help clarify direction with external users and enable internal teams to explore how new ideas might change the way they deliver value. This creates clearer vertical conversations throughout the business. Most importantly, it means concept viability is taken seriously during development, so good ideas are not thrown out.

Use Contexts

Understanding contexts of use means grounding design decisions in the realities of where, how, and by whom the product is experienced. It goes beyond identifying user needs to uncover the social conditions, environments, and workflows that shape real-world interaction. To explore this, we need to look at who the wider community surrounding users are, what tasks are collectively being performed, the tools or systems they rely on, and the physical, interpersonal, and organisational environments that influence decisions.

This understanding gives teams a shared picture of reality and a foundation for partnership. It helps align design, engineering, and business perspectives while creating space to imagine new, integrated products that can adapt to the hidden constraints of the contexts they’re used in.

Technology

Technology, in the broadest sense, is the application of knowledge to achieve a particular goal. Framed like this, every business is really just mediating between people and technologies to deliver value. Throughout my career I have helped companies capture value with different forms of technology: wearable sensors, radar systems, cognitive behavioural therapies, pharmaceuticals, and behavioural science.

Capturing value from technology requires that it can be well adapted to the constraints of user needs, the business, and the context of use. So it’s important, when developing a new product, to select the right technologies for the problem being solved. It also helps when the technology can be broken down into an accessible and malleable form, so it’s understood by the whole team and can be shaped to fit the task at hand. Mapping its properties and constraints can empower multidisciplinary groups, giving them a level playing field to work together and bring new form to the technology being designed.