v1 A demo of a tool I'm building
Triple Diamond Initiative Playbook
As an industry we've spent a decade making our delivery pipelines faster, slicker and more automated. The only problem? A faster pipeline mostly helps you deliver a bad idea to your customers more efficiently.
The bottleneck usually isn't the tooling. It's the invisible context gap: the missing bridge between the what and the why. This playbook is a map of that space, from a rough idea through to running software, so a cross-functional group can see the whole value stream in one place. Its purpose is simple: to make the invisible, visible.
This is v1: an early, single-player demo of the tool I'm building. It runs entirely in your browser, and nothing you enter is sent anywhere.
The interactive playbook needs JavaScript. The full template is on Miroverse.
How to read it
Pick a phase, then work through its stickies. The pale ones are phase goals, the outcomes you want from that phase. The blue ones are activities, the ways you might get there. Flag each one YES or NO for your initiative, and use the emoji legend to say how it's going. None of it is prescriptive. Your organisation is not my organisation, so change the labels.
Heat and cold mapping lets you see where friction concentrates, and where nothing is happening at all. Both tell you something, so there are two maps. The heat and cold map is about the phase goals and activities: which ones you selected, so you can spot the phases that are empty and the ones that are full. The emoji heat map shows where the friction is, from the emojis your team adds.
How to run a session
Flick through the cards. The mapping itself takes about 15 minutes. It isn't a big ceremony.
- 1 / 10
Step 1
Copy the playbook template
- Modify the phases to match your organisation's needs, or keep the provided defaults.
- Adjust the milestones to suit your requirements, or leave them as they are.
- Replace the example phase goals and activities with your own content.
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Step 2
Set up a group session
A small cross-functional group: engineering, product, design, analysis, and whoever else genuinely has a stake.
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Step 3
Write your initiative or idea on a sticky note
For example, "Add saved searches".
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Step 4
Place the sticky notes in the Idea phase
As a group, reframe the initiative as a problem or opportunity statement, for example "Increase repeat bookings by 10%".
⏱ 5 minutes
- 5 / 10
Step 5
Decide which recommended outputs are necessary for this initiative
As a group. Indicate agreement using a key or a colour code. It's not necessary to complete all phases in one session.
⏱ about 2 minutes per phase
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Step 6
Discuss which practices are most likely to achieve the desired results and outcomes
As a group, with the same key or colour code.
⏱ about 2 minutes per phase
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Step 7
Assign owners to each action or practice, and agree timelines
As a group, with the same key or colour code.
⏱ about 2 minutes per phase
- 8 / 10
Step 8
Decide together how and when you'll track progress and update the playbook
⏱ about 5 minutes
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Step 9
Give the team a chance to shape the approach
Make sure everyone can give feedback on the activities and contribute to how the playbook evolves. That can be a separate session in a retrospective, or done asynchronously if the team knows the playbook well.
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At every stage
Identify your stakeholders and dependencies
We strongly recommend that, no matter how complex the initiative, stakeholders and dependencies are identified and considered at every stage.
Other ways to use it
Mapping a live initiative is the obvious use. It isn't the only one.
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Retrospectives
Map an initiative after the fact and the gaps tend to announce themselves.
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Mapping your existing practices
One honest picture of how work really flows, rather than how the process document says it does.
- 3 / 8
Audit and assurance
Plot your procedures and controls against the lifecycle stages, so you can show where they actually live.
- 4 / 8
Heat and cold mapping
See where friction concentrates, and where nothing is happening at all. Both tell you something.
- 5 / 8
Gap analysis
Overlay a lens such as AI, security, quality, accessibility or compliance, then see which phases are covered and which are quietly hoping for the best.
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Defining new measures
Once the stages are visible, the gaps between them become measurable: lead time between stages, rework rate, time spent waiting.
- 7 / 8
Optimising the lifecycle
Decide where AI or automation genuinely earns its place, instead of applying it everywhere at once and hoping.
- 8 / 8
Onboarding
Hand a new joiner the map. Considerably kinder than "you'll pick it up as you go."
Tips
- 1 / 4
Use the emoji legend properly
Over time, the emojis people tag build a heat map of where friction lives. It won't predict your DORA metrics. It tells you where to look.
- 2 / 4
Iterate
The loops are there deliberately. Move backwards when you learn something.
- 3 / 4
Let it surface the unknowns
Most of what goes wrong was never written down anywhere. A shared board gives people somewhere to put the question they'd otherwise keep to themselves.
- 4 / 4
Nothing is wasted
Stop an initiative mid-flight and the context and audit trail are still there when you come back to it.
Who it's for
Engineering leaders, product managers, principal engineers, designers, delivery leads, and anyone else leading from the messy middle. It works best with a small cross-functional group: engineering, product, design, analysis, and whoever else genuinely has a stake.
Where it came from
The playbook was co-created at Cazoo with the team's Lead Designer, with Zendesk's Triple Diamond as our springboard. It extends the Double Diamond popularised by the British Design Council, whose diverge-then-converge shape comes from J.P. Guilford's work on divergent and convergent thinking.
I explain the model in my FastFlowConf 2025 talk, A Ferrari with No GPS: Why Fast Pipelines Can't Fix a Flawed Strategy, and the board itself is on Miroverse.
What's missing from the playbook?
This is v1, and I'm building it in the open. If you try it on a real initiative, I'd love to hear what worked and what didn't.
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