Introduction to Design Thinking

Estimated Time: 30 minutes

In the previous lesson, we said that a product manager’s job is to collaborate with the team to build the right thing and build the thing right.

But how do PMs and designers know the right thing to build? Building new products is an inherently creative endeavor. Some people argue that innovation is driven by singularly gifted visionaries (e.g., Steve Jobs) who see a future that others cannot imagine. They might agree with Henry Ford, the developer of the assembly line and mass automobiles who allegedly said:

Intuition is helpful in product design. But, to build the right thing, an innovator must understand the people for whom the product is being built. This understanding comes from empirical analysis, observation, and yes, asking people what they want. Ford famously stubbornly stuck to his vison for automobiles and, as a result, his company lost market share to General Motors and others who spent more time understanding their customers needs.

Building impactful products is extremely difficult, and even the best companies in the world struggle to do it consistently. You may have heard of famous flops like Google Glass, Apple Newton, Amazon Fire Phone, or Facebook's Libra coin. Product fail for many reasons, but chief among them is that they don't solve a real customer problem. One way to build products that meet user needs is to apply the principles of design thinking to product development.

What is Design Thinking?

As stated in the video

• Design thinking starts with people
• When using a design thinking, innovators attempt to find solutions that:
  • Are constructive
  • Improve users' lives
  • Are feasible to produce
  • Make business sense

Design Thinking Process

Design Thinking Principles

In their paper Understanding Innovation: Design Thinking Christoph Meinel and Harry Leifer of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute of Design at Stanford University (d.school) describe four principles of design thinking:

1. The human rule: design is social in nature — problems must be solved in a way that satisfies human needs and acknowledge the human elements in all technologies.

2. The ambiguity rule: ambiguity is inevitable — experiment at the limits of our knowledge, the limits of our ability to control events, and with the freedom to see things in a different light.

3. The re-design rule: all design is re-design — technology and social circumstances are constantly evolving. We need to understand how our human needs were met in the past.

4. The tangibility rule: making ideas tangible facilitates communication — this directly refers to creating prototypes.

Design Thinking Process

The video describes five stages of design thinking

1. Empathize: research your user's needs to better understand the problem you are trying to solve.
2. Define: with the information gathered from research, define or state the problem
3. Ideate: generate many potential ideas that might solve the problem, and look for alternative solutions
4. Protoype: experiment with various solutions. Create inexpensive prototypes that you can share with users
5. Test: rigorously test prototypes and use the results to refine your problem statement and/or solutions

Though it can be helpful to think of designing thinking as occcuring in steps, the process is rarely linear in practice. The design process is iterative, and you will combine the phases and adapt them to suit your specific needs.

Why Design Thinking Matters

Design thinking helps us craft impactful products. The world is increasingly complex, so we need a way to undersand and address rapid changes to user environments. Design thinking:

• Reduces the time it takes to get a new product to market, which ultimately saves money
• Improve customer retention and loyalty: by building with users, you engage them and increase their ownership and buy-in of the product
• Fosters collaboration: design thinking encourages us to collabroate across company silos and with our users
• Increases innovation: by asking us to challenge assumptions, design thinking builds our creative muscles

As stated in the introductory video, the way to learn design thinking is to try it. For the rest of the course, we'll apply design thinking to go from a product problem to a viable solution.

Optional Resources