Bringing Design Thinking Awareness To Your Company
When your in a fast-paced start-up or an environment where speed of deployment is its primary objective, it’s nearly impossible to avoid getting sucked into the “just do it” mode. Discovery and definition of user insights and validation get tossed to the side for the reckless solutioning against assumptions. At the time it will all make sense and even feel good to solve problems on the fly! You’ll be hooked.
The term MVP (Minimum Viable Product) will be used so frequently and inappropriately that the purpose and meaning of it will be diluted and ultimately forgotten. The constant frenzy will drown out Design Thinking. And, because of that, the product will begin to fall into a cycle of tech, design, and worst of all product debt.
We’ve all seen this image, right? via Spotify
We all hear, “it’s an MVP! We’ll learn by failing fast” just about every day. It’s industry standard.
Why don’t we hear, “succeed fast”?
If taking a week or two to implement Design Thinking and the discovery work allows you to validate or disprove your assumptions and saves you mountains of debt on the backside, is that really moving slow? Isn’t it worth the time? It’s hardly a guess that those two extra weeks pay big dividends on the long game. Even a simple one day design workshop can point your product in the right direction and in a collaborative way.
Now that I’ve painted this bleak picture, Design Thinking and design process don’t have to take a backseat to the speed machine. You can weasel Design Thinking into the day to day. Here are some techniques to get Design Thinking in front of the right people and start to change the cycle.
I believe these efforts are most successful when they are done in a grassroots way.
Image of IDEO Design Workshop via Cargo Creative
Conduct design workshops. Get other disciplines to participate in the process. These workshops don’t have to take weeks or even days. You can get a lot of success out of just a couple of hours.
Do the tough job. Take a day out of every month and sit next to the internal team that are using the product or that are taking customer service calls. Do the job they’re doing. Create a relationship with the pulse of the product or service.
Everyone is a designer: Get them involved. Ask product, engineering, sales, marketing, and stakeholders to take notes during your user interviews. Let them help find solutions to the problems that they’re hearing.
Make your user research available to the company. Set up an internal site where everyone can access and see your research artifacts. Help them understand the user they’re building the product for.
Set up a research youtube channel. Live stream all your user interviews and prototype testing. Put the channel on your internal site so that people can access it any time. Once this is set up you can have several people taking notes during the interviews and testing, leading to better insights.
Meet with different stakeholders. For a few minutes every week talk to a stakeholder about something interesting you’ve learned that ties to their job. Let them know how the team intends to solve the problem.
Solve a problem not on the roadmap. Find a stakeholder that has a problem that might not be on the roadmap and show them how Design Thinking helps solve that problem.
Set up bi-weekly research debriefs. Once your research is done and you’ve synthesized your findings, set up a debrief and invite the whole company. The people who have helped take notes will encourage others to sit in. Grassroots!
Test prototypes with internal team. No one is going to point out product problems faster than the people that are building a business around it every day. These insights are priceless.
Hang your artifacts around the office. Let the team engage with a physical artifact. Let a journey map or a persona be front and center everyday. Let it remind them that there is a human at the other end of the business.
Creating a culture of Design Thinking first doesn’t happen overnight and in a lot of cases the struggle will be eternal. Remember to keep your Design Thinking foundations flexible to meet the changes that your team is sure to have as it grows. Always look for unique ways to engage the whole team (business) in a collaborative way so that a.) everyone understands the problem the product is solving and b.) they feel that they’ve participated in the solution.