The Zendesk Triple Diamond Conversation Starter

When it came time for the Zendesk product design team to document our design process, we all turned to the Design Council’s Double Diamond. Instead of using it as is and calling it a day, we used it as a conversation starter.

It made us think about our process—the good, the bad, and the ugly. We established our needs. We added other workstreams. We outlined milestones that made sense to our organization. In the end, we put our own twist on it and called it the Zendesk Triple Diamond. The visual is cool, but the discussion around it was the real takeaway.

We use the Triple Diamond in different ways here at Zendesk.

1. Onboarding new hires

2. Communicating expectations

3. Framing design maturity during critiques

4. Explaining research activities and their goals

5. Status updates for bigger projects

6. Retrospectives on which diamonds went well/didn’t go well

Two diamonds or three, let us know how you get your teams to communicate, iterate on, and evolve the design process.