If you’ve been in tech even for a short while, I’m sure at some point you, your coworkers, or company execs have fantasized about a full product redesign. I’ve been building digital products since 2014 and I’ve seen my fair share of redesign efforts.

The thought of a fresh start may sound enticing —an opportunity to break free of the design and tech debt holding you back from achieving your goals and making a real impression on your users.

As designers, we often talk about using the different tools in our design tool belt. It’s important we choose the right tool for the job. If we compare improving a product to remodeling a house, a product redesign is a lot like ditching the hammer and nails to go right for the bulldozer. Is it really the right tool for the job? In specific cases, yes, it might make sense. But for most, it just ends up being a more costly, time-intensive, and risky approach to learning what works and what doesn’t. I’ve seen too many teams jump to a redesign too early and get burned by it.

Want to learn more? A brief Google history lesson of “redesign fails” will show you what I’m talking about.

Just think about all the research, time, and energy these companies spent on these efforts — and they still didn’t get it right. It goes to show, no one company is immune to a redesign failure. The bigger the change, the bigger the risk.

If you’re considering a large redesign effort, or feeling immense pressure from others at your company to do so, my hope is that this article can serve as your canary in the coal mine — a friendly nudge to help you step back and widen your perspective. Because if you’re not careful, you may find yourself traveling down a risky and arduous path that’s hard to come back from.

Tactics to work backward from a “we need to blow up the product and redesign everything” mentality

Understand the motivation

Where is this inkling to redesign the product coming from in the first place? Was it just one more piece of user feedback that happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back? Did your top competitor release a new version of their product, causing you to rethink yours? Or perhaps it’s coming from a vocal executive who had an idea they want to push forward.

If you’re feeling pressure from others at your company (likely higher-ups) don’t just take the directive at face value. Really dig until you understand the real why behind the request. This context will help you frame up the exercises we’ll discuss in a moment. After all, as a designer, it’s your job to ensure there’s a real problem being solved before designing. Which brings us to…

Start with the problem, not the solution or method

“We need to redesign [app name]” is not a problem. It’s a solution to solving a problem that hasn’t been clearly articulated. If you don’t have a strong enough why yet, it’s time to get your design, engineering, and product people together to really identify the core problem you aim to solve by redesigning the app.

At this stage your goal is to arrive at ONE core problem that everyone agrees on — not 7. This can be a challenge. If you need help with this process, search YouTube for videos on “How to run a design sprint” such as this overview from

Depending on your team’s understanding of your user’s needs and how well they’re being met, you may need to roll up your sleeves and conduct more product research before you’re ready to discuss and prioritize core issues.

Discussing research best practices is out of the scope of this article. There are many resources to assist with this, but one I recommend is

It’s important to begin with a solid understanding of your product’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to the real user needs of your target personas to in order to accurately identify and prioritize top problem areas. This might feel like a lot of work (and it is), but at this stage, it’s important to get the team aligned and move slower so you can move fast later in the process.

What are all the possible ways to solve this problem?

Got everyone rallied around a single core problem? Hooray! That’s half the battle. Now the fun part — idea generation! If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance the water in the metaphorical well has already been poisoned with the idea of a redesign already. No sweat, you’ll just have to work a little harder to get people to think outside of the box.

Like before, bring your stakeholders together to explore ALL the possible ways this problem could be solved. I typically like to set a minimum number of ideas per person to encourage divergent thinking. Now that you have a bunch of ideas, work with your team to put them on a whiteboard or plot them along an effort impact matrix to help you identify the smallest effort with the highest potential ROI.

What’s the smallest thing you can do to test your assumption?

This is one of the most important mindsets to cultivate across the team. It’s a complete shift in your thinking and approach. You want to get your team to think like they’re detectives or experimenters.

Start with the solutions that appear to have the lowest effort and highest potential impact and ask “How might we prove or disprove these assumptions quickly and easily?” What parts of the solution could you fake or get rid of until you prove value?

The trick is to only focus on those core elements that help solve the primary problem identified earlier and cut the extra fluff for right now. Besides, the more variables you introduce the harder it will be to measure impact. Which brings us to…

How will you know when you’ve succeeded or failed?

Every good experimenter knows what criteria it takes to prove a hypothesis to be correct or faulty. Building product is no different, yet it baffles me just how often we don’t measure if the thing we launched is doing what we thought it would.

Sit down with your team and set specific criteria for how you plan to measure the impact of this change. What are the key success criteria that you’ll monitor in order to know if things are on the right track? More importantly, when will you know if it’s time to abandon your idea and try something else? This is often referred to as “exit criteria.”

Setting appropriate success and exit criteria is challenging, but fortunately there are several resources out there to help you. I encourage you to read design thinker and speaker Christina Wodtke’s book Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Resultsor watch some of her talks for more details on setting strong success and exit criteria.

Closing thoughts

If you and your team follow the tactics above, you should drastically reduce the amount of time and cost it takes to ship something meaningful that gets you one step closer to your initial redesign vision — whether that means putting your foot down on the gas or pivoting to do something different. The key is to create a process that enables you to test your assumptions in a fast and lightweight way. This results in a continuous influx of new information you didn’t have before you started.

Building great product has a lot to do with information gathering and knowledge. The more you can shorten the feedback loop between when you have an idea and how you figure out if that idea is any good, the faster you’ll be able to build a product you users absolutely adore.