Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.
Often, product managers and product designers don’t really understand product marketing. Maybe we’re there to just add some sparkle on the feature messaging.
But I’ve found the Double Diamond to be a helpful way to frame where PMM can add value to the product development process, pull out the specific inputs/outputs from each stage, and help others understand the role we play.
In this post:
What is the Double Diamond?
Created by the UK’s Design Council in the mid 00s, the Double Diamond is a framework to show how, ideally, design happens. Each diamond is split into two halves, representing divergence-convergence.
The first diamond is all about discovering and then defining the problem. The second diamond is how you develop and deliver the solution.
Doing the right thing
The first diamond is how you make sure you’re solving the right problems.
Diverging, during the ‘discover‘ phase, is really about understanding user/market needs through research and insights. We want to look at the world from a pure, unbiased, unencumbered perspective to build a rich picture of user needs through a variety of sources, like:
- Market research
- Customer interviews
- User research
- Competitor insights
- Internal stakeholders
- Technology research
Product marketers, working with UX researchers or product managers, can provide a huge source of insights here with the bread-and-butter of our work.
After broadening the potential, it’s time to converge and define the problem that will be selected.
Having collected research and information, this stage is about creating structured insights that can be used to prioritize problems to be solved through a number of frames, like:
- What’s feasible?
- What problem matters most to our customers?
- Which aligns best with our business mission?
- Which helps us meet our business goals?
This is typically more the work of a product manager, but product marketers can still help by creating synthesised insights (like personas) and supporting prioritization work by representing the voice of the customer.
Doing the thing right
Once you’ve selected a problem opportunity to work on, the second diamond looks at how you solve the chosen problem in the right way.
The divergence phase, develop, is a collaboration between product management, product designers, and engineers. Here, develop might start by wireframing and prototyping potential solutions, refining and validating.
Product marketers can help this part of the process by engaging in ideation workshops and again, representing customers.
This can take a lot of trial and error until the team begin executing on a specific solution to deliver.
With iteration in mind, you might not actually be building code, but perhaps some other indication of the concept: prototypes, landing pages, or ‘wizard-of-oz’ solutions to validate with your customers.
This is often a play between PMs and Engineering until a release plan is developed. Product marketers might get involved in planning and running a beta phase, or maybe planning and executing a full go-to-market launch.
It’s an iterative process
The double diamond is not a linear approach.
It’s expected to be an iterative process, constantly evolving, circling back between stages to ensure that you’re ultimately going to be building the right thing in the right way that delivers value to your customers.
Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
P.S. If you’ve found value in Building Momentum, could you buy me a coffee? Here’s my tip jar – any support is gratefully appreciated!
P.P.S: If you enjoyed this post, will you share Building Momentum with your network?