Turning Flat Solutions Into Impactful Ones

When Good Work Falls Flat

In Q2 of 2022 at Dropbox, I was a Design Director overseeing teams working in new areas—freelancer tooling, admin actions—and a few of our solutions weren’t sticking. Some shipped features looked promising at first, but they didn’t make much impact. The riskiest bet was a time-tracking feature. It was polished, but it wasn’t solving anything people really cared about.

My Role as Design Director

This was my responsibility. Not to redesign the feature myself, but to help my team figure out why our work wasn’t landing—and to help them build the skills to avoid this trap in the future.

The Real Problem

When I dug in, I realized what was happening. The team was moving fast, which usually I encourage, but in this case speed had a cost. Designers were focusing on user experience details and execution, but skipping the hard part: validating value. We weren’t asking, is this the right problem? or does this solution actually matter? Effort was being measured in design hours, not in ROI.

Resetting with a Framework

I knew we needed a reset. I brought the designers together and shared a framework I rely on: diagnosis, principles, actions. We diagnosed the issue—too much energy on polish, not enough on value. We agreed on principles to guide us: scope to impact, show your work so feedback comes early, and break things down instead of going all in on big bets. Then we turned those into actions: identify risk up front, align on design time needed, document the process and share it with partners, and test value on medium- and large-sized projects before going too deep.

How the Team Responded

The team ran with it. One designer introduced lightweight “plans of action” that made our design process transparent and invited PMs in earlier. Another led concept testing sessions, bringing early user feedback into critiques before ideas hardened. Suddenly, plans were being shared openly, concept tests were informing direction, and PMs were leaning in with curiosity instead of just waiting for handoffs.

What Changed

The shift was dramatic. Riskier projects started getting tested for value before anyone sunk months of work. Vague ideas like “time tracking” sharpened into clear problems like “help me get paid,” and then into focused solutions like “create me an invoice.” Designers weren’t just executing—they were shaping strategy. PMs began engaging more deeply in the design process, and the team itself started adding new process ideas beyond the ones I’d suggested.

Our solutions got smaller, sharper, and less risky. More importantly, the team gained new habits—plans of action and concept testing—that raised the quality of design work across the board.

“When you slow down just enough to validate value, you actually speed up the path to solutions that matter.”