Align — agree what you're doing and why
Before anyone does research or sketches an idea, the team needs a shared brief. Align is about making implicit assumptions explicit and agreeing what success looks like.
Discover — go and learn
Talk to people. Watch them work. Read what's already known. The goal is to replace opinion with evidence — and to be changed by what you learn.
Define — make sense of it
Synthesise the messy raw notes into themes, journeys, and a clear problem statement. If you can't say the problem in a sentence, you can't solve it.
Develop — generate and test
Sketch lots of options, pick the most promising, prototype them cheaply, and learn what works before you commit.
Deliver — refine and hand over
Tighten the design, write what the people who build it need to know, and define how you'll measure whether it actually works.