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DESIGN TEMPLATE

Design Strategy Template

Design team direction: vision, principles, focus areas, design system status, research roadmap, and team growth.

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What's inside

Field

Details

Scope

Product / product area / entire org

Author

Design lead

Horizon

This year / next 6 months

Status

Draft

Last Updated

Design Vision

What does the ideal user experience look like in 1-2 years? Not a feature list — a description of how it feels to use the product. What will users say about it?

Where We Are Today

What's Working

  • Design strength to preserve

  • Pattern or component that users respond well to

  • Process that helps the team move fast

What's Not Working

  • UX debt: where the experience is inconsistent or confusing

  • Process gap: where design is a bottleneck or gets bypassed

  • Skill gap: what the team can't do well yet

Design Principles

3-5 principles that guide design decisions. These are the tiebreakers when you're stuck between two options. They should be opinionated enough to actually exclude something.

Principle

What It Means

What It Rules Out

e.g., "Fast over fancy"

Prioritize performance and simplicity over visual polish

Heavy animations, large hero images, decorative elements that slow the page

Focus Areas

The 2-4 themes the design team is investing in this cycle.

Focus Area

Why Now

Key Initiatives

Success Metric

e.g., Design system maturity

Inconsistency slows eng and confuses users

Audit components, document patterns, build missing pieces

Eng can ship a standard page without pinging design

e.g., Onboarding experience

Activation rate is XX% — half of signups never complete setup

Redesign first-run flow, add contextual guidance

Activation rate from XX% to XX%

Design System

Current state of the design system and where it's headed.

Area

Status

Next Step

Component library

Partial

What's missing, what needs updating

Tokens (color, spacing, type)

Done

Documentation

Needs Work

Figma ↔ code sync

Partial

Research Roadmap

What do we need to learn, and when?

Study

Goal

Method

When

Status

Research topic

What we want to learn

Interviews / usability test / survey

Planned

Planned

Team & Skills

Skill

Current

Needed

Plan

Visual design

UX research

Interaction / prototyping

Accessibility

Content / UX writing

How Design Works With Other Teams

Collaboration

Current Process

What We Want to Change

Design ↔ Product

How work gets requested and prioritized

Design ↔ Engineering

Handoff process, how feedback flows back

Design ↔ Research

How research informs design decisions

What We're NOT Doing

  • Initiative or request we're deliberately deprioritizing and why

  • Area we're choosing not to invest in this cycle

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