For startups and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), problems knock on your door uninvited and at unexpected times. You get two options, either panic, or find a solution. And most often, the toughest part isn’t just coming up with solutions but understanding exactly what problem you need to solve. That’s exactly what a design framework helps with. We’ll tackle the ins and outs of a successful design framework and how to structure it for your growing needs.
What are design frameworks and why do we need them?
A design framework is a basic, structured visual tool that organizes the key dimensions or ideas for a project. It provides teams with a systematic approach by breaking the process down into manageable parts to solve problems and deliver projects.
But why can’t the project’s goal alone guide us? Because unlike textbook problems, real business challenges today are fluid, and multi-dimensional. They involve many interconnected factors and often no absolute right or wrong answers, just better or worse.
We’re used to the clarity of school lessons, where problems come neatly packaged with examples and step-by-step solutions. But today, tackling complex challenges requires frameworks that help us break down ambiguity, understand moving parts, and navigate uncertainty with confidence.
A design framework brings much-needed clarity and structure. It helps teams see the whole picture while zooming in on the most important elements. With a clear framework, you can focus your research, align your team on shared goals, and lead ideation toward practical, insightful solutions. It turns fuzzy, unstructured problems into actionable opportunities, setting the foundation for smarter, faster decision-making.
How to design a framework
To design a framework for your SMB, you need to start with basics like gathering insights and then turn them into a clear visual that your whole team can understand and work from. Here’s how you can start:
Start with SMB Basics
Research: Build a human-centered and data-informed foundation
The foundation of any strong design framework is thorough research. To build a framework that truly reflects the problem and sparks effective solutions, you need a deep understanding of the situation from multiple angles. And factor in social, cultural, and economic contexts to build a framework that’s truly relevant.
Start by engaging directly with people who know the problem best — your customers, users, and internal team members. Conduct interviews, surveys, or focus groups to uncover their experiences, needs, pain points, and aspirations. This approach gets you real-world insights rather than assumptions.
Beyond qualitative insights, quantitative data plays a crucial role. Analyze user behavior metrics, sales trends, customer support logs, and market data to identify patterns or anomalies that inform the problem’s shape. This combination of qualitative and quantitative research brings depth and balance to your understanding.
With artificial intelligence (AI), you can fasten up this research phase. AI-powered analytics platforms can quickly sift through vast amounts of data, from customer feedback and social media mentions to usage logs, highlighting key themes and emerging trends you might miss manually. You can summarize large volumes of text input and identify sentiment or priority areas. AI chatbots can also help gather new user insights interactively and at scale.
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Here's your free guide!Identify categories from research insights
Once you’ve gathered plenty of research, the next step is to find the main themes or categories that will form the backbone of your framework. These categories are the important areas or topics that you need to focus on.
Many times, your framework will focus on the customer and their needs. But a framework could also be about industry structure, the structure of a current service, or a major trend like the sharing economy.
To identify these key categories, review your research carefully and look for patterns or repeated ideas. For example, you might notice several customers mention challenges with onboarding, while others talk a lot about pricing concerns. Each of these could become a category in your framework.
This step is all about organizing your information in a way that makes sense and highlights what really matters. The clearer your categories, the easier it will be for your team to understand the problem and generate ideas later on.
Tools like Slack make it easy to discuss, organize, and refine your categories with your team in real time. Features like Channels, threads, and integrations allow teams to collaborate smoothly and stay aligned throughout the process.
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Visualize categories for clarity
Now it’s time to visualize (literally). A visual layout helps everyone quickly understand the framework and how the categories relate to each other. There are several simple ways to organize your categories depending on the story you want to tell:
- Tables: Work well if you have a list of categories without many connections between them. It’s a clean way to organize information side by side.
- Venn diagrams: Great when categories overlap or share common areas. They help show how different ideas are connected.
- Timelines or flowcharts: Work if your categories follow a sequence or process, like steps in a customer journey or project phases.
- Journey maps: Useful when you want to highlight stages of a customer experience or service process, showing emotions, pain points, and needs along the way.
If you have the right customer relationship management (CRM) platforms by your side, visualizing is just a click away. Modern CRMs like Salesforce often include built-in visualization tools and dashboards. It can:
- Visualize customer segments, behaviors, and interactions.
- Help you see key categories around customer needs and experiences.
- Track journey stages, sales pipelines, or service processes in timeline or flowchart formats.
- Integrate data from multiple sources to automatically update these visuals.
Wherever you are — just get started.
No matter where you are on your journey as a business owner, you can get started with Starter Suite for free — the CRM made for growth.
Use the framework for ideation and solving problems
Once your framework is in place, it becomes your guide for creativity and problem-solving. Instead of starting with a blank slate, it provides a specific framing to help others quickly understand the nuances of the problem.
During brainstorming sessions or workshops, use the categories in your framework to divide and conquer. For example, small groups can each take a specific part of the framework and generate ideas tailored to that area.
The framework also helps prioritize which problems to tackle first by highlighting key pain points or opportunities discovered during research. It acts as a shared reference that keeps your team aligned and on the same page as you move from ideas to action.
Keep the framework flexible during ideation. As new ideas and insights come up, update it to reflect these changes. This keeps your problem-solving grounded in learning and helps you see connections between different solution areas.
Build your first modern design framework today
Problems won’t send you a notification before arriving. You need a framework to help you research and organize all your ideas, anticipated problems in a structured format. It directs you toward possible solution directions and communicates it to others better. Check out the Salesforce Design blog for more information or Salesforce Design to learn more.
So why wait? Start your journey with the Free or Starter Suite today. Looking for more customization? Explore Pro Suite. Already a Salesforce customer? Activate Foundations to try out Agentforce 360 today.
AI supported the writers and editors who created this article.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
A design framework is a simple visual tool that helps organize your project’s main parts so you can focus on the real issues. For small businesses, it’s a way to make sense of complexity, save time, and avoid costly mistakes by getting everyone on the same page from the start.
If your challenge feels messy, with lots of moving pieces or unclear priorities, a framework can help. When you don’t have a clear plan or your team struggles to align on what to tackle first, it’s a good sign you need one.
Absolutely. You don’t need fancy tools or big budgets. Start simple. Organize your ideas into categories, pick a visual style like a table or journey map, and use easy-to-learn tools like Starter Suite.
Update it whenever you get new information, customer feedback, or when priorities shift. Regular check-ins keep your team aligned and your problem-solving fresh and relevant.
Don’t treat your framework as just a box to check off. The biggest mistake is building it and then forgetting about it. To get real value, use it actively to guide discussions, ideation, and decisions throughout your project journey.
