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Collaborative design means collaborating with everybody involved in a project from day one — including your stakeholders. Involving stakeholders means that they're on board throughout a project instead of being taken by surprise at the end. Their role isn't restricted like it is in creative collaboration. You can take them with you on the creative journey. With transparent, real-time feedback and editing, you can show stakeholders that their suggestions are acted on immediately. It's also easier to show the development of creative decisions and justify the choices you've made. That reduces the risk of sudden changes, rejecting creative assets, or even canceled projects. And once again, it creates a positive feedback loop: more trust from your stakeholders means more creative freedom so that you can keep impressing them.

Collaborative design teams work together at every step of the design process. Here are the nine stages that apply to most creative teams. Yours might look a little different based on your team’s processes, client base, and the types of assets you produce.

1. Preparation

Before anything else, you need to know what you're working on. Collaborative design starts with setting out clear aims for everyone on the project. They need to know:

• 1) The goal of the project
• 2) When to hit key milestones
• 3) Their individual roles

2. Research

In collaborative design, all of this research should be available to everyone on the team, so that they have full context for their creative decisions. What should you be researching? At a minimum, make sure you look into:

The project goals and stakeholder expectations
Potential roadblocks
Project’s target audience
Client (preferences, tone of voice, brand and style guidelines, prior successful projects — the works)
Competitors (and their content

3. Ideation and exploration

With a foundation of research, you can start brainstorming ideas to create your best work. Techniques that work well for collaborative design include shared mind maps and mood boards. However, there should also be space for people to sketch out ideas in whatever way works for them. Some writers like to brainstorm with a pen and paper, then bring their ideas to a meeting. Artists might want to sketch, and video producers might want to storyboard. At this stage, anything goes!

4. Prototyping and refinement

Once you have a shortlist of promising ideas, each team member can start building up a prototype of their idea. Mockups, storyboards, and outlines are all a starting point for feedback. At this stage, concepts don't have to be perfect; they're just a springboard. It’s important to emphasize the “refinement” part of this stage. In this phase, expect any design to go through at least a few adjustments internally before everyone agrees that it’s ready for the next stage. This is where internal feedback is so valuable because it preps your assets for the high-stakes part of the process: presenting to the client.

5. Evaluating and validation

Feedback is what makes collaborative design work — whether it's feedback within the team, from stakeholders, or even from test audiences. Like every other stage of the project, the feedback that you gather should be shared with every stakeholder and team member.

6.Finalize and handoff

Next, you're ready to create the final product. Collaborative design teams continue to work together during this stage, as they incorporate feedback and make final tweaks. And since every member of the team has access to the same feedback, they can work together on any big-picture changes. You'll also need a plan for handing off projects and creative assets. Although the team is collaborative, it’s helpful to have a single point person for any changes or discussion needed after the handoff