Dont you want to discuss and talk about a design before you even touch a keyboard? In my projects we always discus high level overviews with pen and whiteboards. Nobody should even dare to touch a keyboard.
Absolutely, I pretty much always start with design sessions on a whiteboard (or if remote a call using draw.io).
That discussion is almost never going down the the level of an individual class and NEVER adheres to the UML standard.
Very occasionally I've had discussions about class structure by drawing class name + methods on a whiteboard but having the same discussion using Visual Studio's UML projection was just as effective.
