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The Role of This Tool in the Fourth Phase of the Design Thinking Method
In the Develop phase, Role Storming invites the team to generate ideas by temporarily inhabiting the roles of different ecosystem stakeholders—end users, frontline staff, partners, operations, support, or regulators—so that concepts reflect real needs and constraints across the system. This creates empathy‑rich ideation and surfaces practical, implementable ideas that a single‑perspective team might otherwise overlook. It helps ensure that concepts are co‑created with, rather than imposed on, the people who will live with them.
Role Storming is most suitable for service and ecosystem problems involving multiple players and handoffs—such as designing end‑to‑end journeys, cross‑department processes, or partner‑enabled services. It is particularly effective when you want to anticipate operational friction, adoption barriers, and support needs as you develop concepts.
Role Storming is constrained by how well participants understand each role; if knowledge is shallow or biased, the ideas may not genuinely reflect stakeholder needs. It can also become chaotic if too many roles are used at once, and it requires disciplined synthesis afterward to avoid producing a fragmented set of unconnected requests.
The Procedure for Using This Design Thinking Tool
Step 1: Map the key roles involved in delivering and experiencing the solution (e.g., customer, call‑centre agent, branch staff, installer, partner, compliance officer) and briefly describe each.
Step 2: Assign each participant or small group a role and give them a few minutes to step into that role’s mindset—goals, pain points, constraints, and motivations.
Step 3: In character, each role group brainstorms ideas and concept features that would make the experience work exceptionally well for them, capturing needs, supports, and design requests.
Step 4: Bring the groups together to share their role‑based ideas and highlight conflicts, dependencies, and opportunities where interests align.
Step 5: Combine insights into integrated concept options or design principles that address multiple roles, and select promising directions for further elaboration and prototyping.
Tips for Facilitators: The facilitator should map the key roles in the ecosystem (end-user types, frontline staff, back‑office, partners, compliance, IT, etc.) and create concise role descriptions that capture their needs, constraints, and success criteria. They prepare these as role cards or profiles that can be assigned to participants, ensuring that critical roles are covered without overwhelming the group with too many. The facilitator also plans how insights will be synthesised across roles (e.g., a shared canvas with columns per role, or a joint “service system” map) and sets expectations that participants should advocate for “their” role, even when it conflicts with others, to surface real tensions early.
Next Steps in Your Design Thinking Journey
Continue your innovation journey with the following 3 Options to deepen your Design Thinking practice and amplify your impact.
