Case Study
Rethinking Design Thinking
Modifying a standard design thinking process to increase discovery outputs by 10x
Role: Lead Strategist & Experience Director
Client: Energy Company
Industry: Energy
Duration: 3 months
Team: 6 (UX, research, strategy)
The Problem
A product manager for an engineering design department wanted to use design thinking workshops to identify the best innovation options for a new product. He needed deep, detailed discovery across global business units to surface a comprehensive set of pain points and requirements. And he needed every one of those business units aligned on which pain points the product would actually address.
His plan was the standard approach: run two large workshops — one for opportunity framing, one for solution framing — and let participants brainstorm, analyze, and prioritize in real time.
I knew that wouldn’t work.
Large workshops are excellent at creating alignment and building shared ownership. They are terrible at generating the depth of insight you need for a serious discovery effort. If participants sorted through raw data in a workshop setting, we’d end up with a handful of surface-level ideas and nothing resembling the rigorous synthesis a product decision of this scale required.
The standard two-workshop model optimizes for speed and participation. This project needed depth and precision.
My Approach
I redesigned the process. Instead of cramming discovery and synthesis into workshops, I separated them into distinct phases led by different groups with different strengths.
The standard approach runs two workshops: the first brainstorms discovery insights and identifies opportunities; the second brainstorms solutions and explores concepts. Participants do everything — discover, analyze, synthesize, prioritize — in the room.
My modified approach broke this into five phases:
First, I pulled discovery out of the workshop entirely. My team conducted 25 user interviews — deep dives into business units, departments, and roles across the organization. Small teams of researchers and strategists synthesized the findings into clearly articulated insights and opportunities. This is work that requires focused analytical skill, not crowd energy.
Then I brought the broader stakeholder group back in. I invited the interview participants, key stakeholders, and representative end users into a workshop — not to brainstorm from scratch, but to review, challenge, adjust, and prioritize the synthesis work my team had already done. This put workshop participants where they’re strongest: reacting to concrete material, debating priorities, and building alignment around a shared understanding.
After that workshop, my team synthesized the outcomes into solution concepts. A second workshop reviewed and ranked those solutions, and a final phase produced detailed product concepts from the top-ranked ideas.
I led a team of six — myself as Experience Director, one UX Architect, and one Business Analyst in the core research team, plus four co-facilitators for the workshops. Workshops included both remote sessions (50+ participants across four breakout groups) and a hybrid in-person/remote session (25+ participants across five breakout groups).
Key Decisions
Separating discovery from alignment. This was the foundational call. Workshops create energy and buy-in; small expert teams create rigorous synthesis. Using each format for what it does best — instead of forcing workshops to do everything — is what produced 10x the discovery outputs. The standard approach would have generated a handful of sticky notes. My approach generated 90+ viable digital transformation opportunities.
Structured review over open brainstorming. In both workshops, participants reviewed pre-synthesized material rather than starting from blank walls. This meant the conversation focused on whether the insights were right and which opportunities mattered most — not on generating ideas from scratch in a time-pressured room. The quality of the debate was dramatically higher because people were reacting to specific, well-formed propositions.
Three-dimension voting for prioritization. I designed a prioritization framework that forced business units to evaluate opportunities from multiple angles rather than defaulting to what felt most familiar. Using Mural boards for remote collaboration, this approach pushed participants to examine their day-to-day work from perspectives they wouldn't have considered otherwise.
Outcomes
The design thinking workstream delivered two products that reimagined and digitized existing business processes.
90+ viable digital transformation opportunities identified (vs. the ~10 a standard workshop approach typically produces)
5 detailed innovation concepts developed
2 detailed product concepts ready for development backlog
25 user interviews conducted across global business units
50+ participants across two remote workshops with four breakout groups
25+ participants in a hybrid in-person/remote workshop with five breakout groups
Product strategy recommendations that digitally transformed specific business processes
The client's own oversight lead — someone who had run similar processes in a previous career — summarized it directly: he'd never delivered this much, this quickly.
Reflection
This project is the clearest example of something I believe strongly: process orthodoxy kills outcomes. Design thinking is a powerful framework, but treating it as a rigid two-workshop recipe ignores the reality that different activities require different conditions to produce their best results. Discovery needs depth and expertise. Alignment needs participation and shared ownership. The mistake most teams make is trying to get both from the same format. If I ran this again, I’d add a lightweight validation step between the solution synthesis and the second workshop — even a few quick concept tests with end users would have sharpened the solution concepts before putting them in front of stakeholders for ranking.