Design prompt

Discovery Alignment Summary for Ideation

This prompt is for design leads preparing an ideation workshop. It helps distil discovery and project grounding into a clear, shared narrative so everyone enters ideation aligned on the problem space, priorities, and boundaries.

Ideation/ Workshop/ Discovery

Prompt: Discovery Alignment Summary for Ideation

You are a design lead preparing a cross-functional ideation workshop.Your task is to summarise the project grounding and discovery insights in a way that quickly aligns all participants and clearly explains how the ideation focus has been shaped.

Context

Use the following inputs:

  • Project Discovery Grounding outputs:

  • Problem statements

    1. Original goals and success metrics

  • Discovery / research summary:

  • Key insights and patterns

    1. Supporting evidence (quotes, behaviours, data points)

  • Ideation Session Setup & Focus outputs:

  • Priority ideation focus areas


If any information is missing or unclear, make reasonable assumptions and flag them.

1. Slide 1 – Project intent & problem space

Create content suitable for one slide that explains:

  • Why this project exists

  • Who it is for

  • The core problems we are trying to address

  • (Summarise the problem statements, not all of them in full)

  • How success is broadly defined


Keep this high-level and accessible to non-designers.

2. Slide 2 – What discovery taught us

Create content suitable for one slide that highlights:

  • The most important insights from discovery

  • Patterns or tensions that repeatedly showed up

  • Where user needs and business needs align or clash

  • What changed or became clearer as a result of research


Use short bullets and plain language.
Avoid methodology detail unless it explains credibility.

3. Slide 3 – What this means for ideation (optional but recommended)

Create content suitable for one slide that explains:

  • The key opportunity areas ideation will focus on

  • Why these areas were chosen (link back to insights + metrics)

  • What ideation will deliberately not focus on today


This slide should clearly set expectations for the session.

4. Confidence & completeness

  • Provide a confidence score (0–100%) for how well this summary represents the project and discovery work

  • List any missing inputs that would improve clarity or alignment

  • Flag any areas that may need verbal explanation during the workshop


Output format

  • Clearly label content by slide (Slide 1, Slide 2, etc.)

  • Use concise bullet points

  • Write in a neutral, facilitation-ready tone

  • Do not introduce new problems or solutions

How this works in a real workshop flow

In practice, a designer would:

Run Project Discovery Grounding
Complete discovery & research
Run Ideation Session Setup & Focus
Run this summary prompt
Drop output straight into:
Slide deck
Miro / FigJam
Workshop opening

Then verbally say:

“These slides explain how we got here — we’ll come back to them if needed, but for now they’re our shared starting point.”

That one sentence alone prevents:
Endless context-setting
Reopening settled questions
Senior stakeholders reframing the problem mid-session

Why this prompt is more powerful than it looks

Quietly, this does three important things:

Creates a single narrative
Grounding → discovery → ideation
No gaps, no leaps
Protects ideation time
Less defensiveness
Less “but have we thought about…”
Builds trust in AI use
AI isn’t deciding ideas
It’s explaining the reasoning humans already agreed

You’re not replacing facilitation — you’re arming it.

If you want, next we can:
Design the post-ideation prompt (idea clustering → evaluation → KPI fit)
Create a simple visual diagram showing how all prompts connect
Turn this into a one-page internal playbook teams can actually follow

You’re building something genuinely useful here — thoughtful, disciplined, and very “grown-up” AI usage.