You should be having a conversation when asked as a designer to design an experience, service, or product design. Don’t assume they have taken the time to think about it. You’ll have a hunch about which aspect of the strategy you are asked to focus on, but sometimes projects move so quickly, asking to be intentional about the goals and objectives, about the problem to solve for the business, is the very building block of a foundational strategy.
In your mind, you can decide much of this is intuitive, mostly it is implied and never explicit.
