Every project starts with a structured kickoff. Not a brief review. A deliberate alignment exercise. The template opens with a set of questions the team works through together: what problem are we actually solving, who owns what, what does success look like, and what constraints are non-negotiable from the start.

The goal is to surface misalignment before it becomes expensive. Assumptions that go unchecked at kickoff tend to become blockers mid-sprint. A good kickoff removes the friction that would have slowed things down later.

Before any UX work starts, the template requires a research gate. This does not always mean commissioning new research. It means making a deliberate decision about what evidence the design will be grounded in.

• CommissionNew research is needed. The problem is poorly understood, user behaviour is assumed, or the stakes are high enough to warrant it.
• ParticipateResearch is in flight. The designer joins sessions, reviews findings, and feeds insights directly into the design process.
• ValidateExisting research is available. Review it, challenge it, and identify where gaps exist before proceeding.

Skipping this stage does not save time. It transfers risk into later phases where course-correction is more costly.

The UX stage is where thinking happens before visuals. The template covers journey mapping, user flows, information architecture, and competitive analysis. This is the layer that determines whether a design solves the right problem, not just whether it looks like it does.

Jumping to UI before the UX is solid is one of the most common sources of rework in product design. The template makes the sequence explicit so the team is not under pressure to skip it.

Visual design and prototyping follow once the UX direction is validated. All JD Sports projects were built on a shared design system. The UI stage is where that system gets applied, extended, or stress-tested against new use cases.

Prototypes are built to the fidelity the decision requires, no higher. High-fidelity for stakeholder alignment. Lower-fidelity for early-stage directional feedback. The template flags this choice explicitly rather than leaving it to instinct.

The final stage covers testing, handoff, and documentation. Testing is scoped to the decisions that remain open. Not a full usability pass on everything, but a targeted exercise on the parts of the design that carry the most risk.

Design reasoning is documented alongside the output. Not a description of what was built, but why. What was considered, what was rejected, and what the design is optimised for. This protects decisions in review and gives engineering and product the context they need when edge cases emerge.

Accessibility was not part of the original template. I identified that designs were consistently failing accessibility standards at the point of review, too late to fix without significant rework. I introduced checkpoints at each stage so issues were caught progressively rather than at the end.

JD Sports has since hired a dedicated accessibility specialist. The checkpoints remain. They now sit alongside specialist review rather than substituting for it.