Strategy before pixels
Why I always run at least one positioning session before opening Figma — and what I do in that session.
There's a common pattern I see when joining a project mid-stream: the design work has started, but nobody can clearly articulate what problem the product is solving, for whom, and why it's better than doing nothing.
This isn't a criticism — it's a symptom of how most product teams operate under pressure. There's a brief. There's a deadline. There's Figma. So you open Figma.
The cost shows up later. In review cycles that go in circles. In copy that doesn't land. In a launch that underwhelms.
What a positioning session actually is
I'm not talking about a day-long offsite with sticky notes and a whiteboard facilitator. I mean a focused 90-minute conversation with the people who know the product best, structured around four questions:
- Who, specifically, is this for? Not a persona card — a real person in a real situation. Name them if you can.
- What are they trying to do when they encounter this product? The job, not the feature.
- What makes this the best way to do that job? Not unique features — actual reasons why this approach wins.
- What do we want them to feel or believe after using it for the first time?
Four questions. Ninety minutes. You'd be surprised how often the answers are murky, contested, or missing entirely.
Why this matters for design
When you know the answers, design decisions make themselves. The visual tone, the copy hierarchy, the friction you leave in and the friction you remove — it all flows from who this is for and what they need to feel.
When you don't know the answers, you're making aesthetic choices in a vacuum. Some of them will be good. Some won't. And you won't know which until you're in front of users, or worse, in front of a launch metric.
The session is free. The rework isn't.