Leading a Greenhouse Sprint for Strategic UX

As a UX design lead, I’m often asked to deliver clarity at high speed, in complex systems, with limited inputs. But some of the most meaningful design work I’ve done hasn’t come from execution, it’s come from stepping upstream, building enough structure to catch the signal before it fades.

I recently had the opportunity to lead a speculative design sprint rooted in deep quality research, framed through Todd Henry’s greenhouse approach, and ultimately handed off at the right moment to the right team.

The Opportunity: When There’s No Brief, Just a Signal

The work didn’t begin with a defined problem, there was no scope, no backlog, and no formal ownership structure. What we did have, though, was clear permission to explore. That kind of trust speaks volumes about the leadership behind this effort, and I’m grateful to my manager and sponsor for making it possible.

The goal of the design sprint was to frame early possibilities that could inform more robust requirements downstream. While the work was intended for handoff to a team better positioned for execution, we remain closely aligned, and ready to re-engage as strategic partners and consultants as the work advances.

The Greenhouse in Action: Evidence + Imagination

In Herding Tigers, Todd Henry writes about the creative leader’s job as protecting environments that can thrive without controlling the work. We built that. We conducted a series of long-form, 60-90 minute walkthrough interviews, as deeply human conversations that gave us a qualitative dataset. From that we mapped what I call “trigger moments”, points in the experience where targeted interventions could shift the customer story.

We created artifacts that embodied empathy, insight, and speculative promise and then displayed them at scale in our dedicated team room, which I refer to as our “working walls.” These walls became an active surface for reflection and engagement, allowing the work to evolve visibly and collectively. Over time, they became powerful tools for alignment, imagination, and strategic storytelling across teams.

Greenhouse to Garden

Something interesting occured as the energy built. Internal partners began showing up unprompted. New collaborators emerged. And eventually a fully resourced team, better positioned for execution, stepped in to carry the work forward.

Two major sessions were scheduled:

• A leadership-level workshop to onboard leadership to the concepts

• A broader off-site onboarding to extend the conversation department-wide

At that point, we recognized the greenhouse had done its job. The speculative artifacts had taken root generating enough clarity, momentum, and internal alignment to shift out of exploration and into real-world execution.

The most strategic move wasn’t to keep holding the work, but to let it evolve in the garden, a delivery environment where ambiguity meets constraints, decisions accelerate, and design moves from possibility to production.

How We Used Design to Shape Direction

Too often, design is invited in after the structure is built. We inheret fixed scopes, narrow frames, and executional constraints. But when UX Design shows up upstream, with the right mindset, and the right kind of container, we do more than design screens. We design possibility.

This sprint worked because:

• It was grounded in evidence-based insight

• It used speculative design to provoke aligned imagination

• It pivoted at the right moment, protecting the creative signal while avoiding overreach

And yes, some didn’t fully grasp what we had done at first. But they felt it. The greenouse was magnetic, even for those who couldn’t articulate why. That’s the power of holding space instead of chasing deliverables.

Why the Greenhouse Delivers Value

Todd Henry outlines a principle in Herding Tigers that’s central to leading creative teams: the most powerful environments are those that balance freedom with clear boundaries. When expectations are well defined, but exploration is protected, creative work becomes more focused and more transferable.

This sprint demonstrated that when UX is trusted to help shape direction early, before decisions solidify, it creates conceptual clarity, cross-functional energy, early alignment, and strategic options for the business.

Not only was the value in the volume of UX design artifacts, it was also in the quality of attention, the depth of empathy, and the fact that we knew when to give way to broader engagement, passing the signal forward, not as a severance, but as a natural expansion.

Making Greenhouses a Capability

This experience proves the power of the greenhouse. It showed us that this approach can scale. We now have a repeatable, lightweight way to:

• Identify early signals before scope hardens

• Align stakeholders with minimal overhead

• Provoke strategic imagination through evidence, not assumption

• Hand off strong signals to the right teams at the right time

Greenhouse work doesn’t have to be a rare design flex, it has the potential to be a strategic capability, and it deserves support, visibility, and a home in how we operate going forward.

I’d love to see this become part of how we respond to ambiguity and not as an exception, but as a practiced response to emerging opportunity. Our design greenhouse is open for business.