Product design plan

Description

Before a product ever reaches a designer, a complex chain of decisions and collaboration has already begun. In this session, we’ll explore the broader product development ecosystem and your role within it as a designer.

We’ll cover:

How products are born – Understand what happens before design: how ideas are initiated, who’s involved (from stakeholders to product managers), and how expectations toward Product Designers are shaped during early decisions.

What a brief is—and how to read it – Learn to decode a design brief, understanding its role as the formal birth of a product concept and how it sets the direction for your work.

Intro to project management – Get familiar with key concepts like the project triangle (scope, time, cost), waterfall vs. agile, and the importance of risk management in product delivery.

The business value of design – Discover how design contributes not just to aesthetics, but to business efficiency and strategy. Drawing from What CEOs Need to Know About Design, we’ll look at how design reduces waste, enables better decision-making, and supports systems thinking for scalable, cost-effective outcomes.

This lesson will help you see design not as a siloed task, but as an integrated function that adds measurable value across the company.