Making the Double Diamond Work For Your Business

A Product Manager’s Guide to Product in Practice

If you’ve ever worked with a double-diamond approach, this drawing is probably very familiar to you:

Like most frameworks popular in Product Management, it comes with a ton of big ideas and not a lot of guidance on how to approach them from tactical perspective. While this gives Product more freedom to define their own cycles, ceremonies and cadences, it also means that teams try to apply an Agile approach to a framework that tends to operate like a waterfall. Making it work on a day-to-day can be tough but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to forgo it all together.

Falling back into waterfall mode is particularly true when you work at smaller start ups and are trying to transition from one way of working to another. For example, discovery takes time and what you don’t want is your developers not working while you are discovery what one should be working on. The implication there is that what is being worked on currently is not necessarily what you should be working on since you are still figuring it out. What you end up getting is something like this: