Yes, Design Thinking works … if you do it right.
Design Thinking is often maligned and misunderstood, but can be powerfully integrated into Agile development
Design Thinking gets a bad rap, but it’s often either badly applied or misunderstood. Debbie Levitt’s article Was Design Thinking Designed To Not Work? asks rhetorical questions about generating weak ideas, but, with hypothesis-driven development, assumptions about customers and their needs are tested first, before any ideas are generated.
The main economic gains from Agile are realised through avoiding waste: weed out the bad ideas first, build only what you need, and correct course quickly rather than blundering to market with something unsuitable.
If how-to-build process is driven by “if we do this, we think this will happen” (so we’ll test it), then it makes sense that your what-to-build process is driven by that, too.
Design Thinking can drive that what-to-build process:
- Get everyone to contribute to an empathy-map proto-persona summarizing what they think their customers’ problems are.
- Test it through interviews. Needfinding interview scripts are best written by UX or market research professionals (to avoid bias), but it’s also best to get the whole dev team involved in developing the script and watching the interviews so you’re not throwing stuff over the fence.
- Rewrite your qualitative empathy map persona using real quotes and information from the interviews (which will probably invalidate half the assumptions from your initial proto-persona).
- List what your customers are trying to get done, what they are doing now, and what qualities your solution would need to provide in order to do it better.
You can then start generating ideas.
The ideation workshop doesn’t take people away from their jobs. It is people doing their jobs. The facilitator would normally be an internal person. In practice, that’s usually someone either from Customer Insights, UX/Design or an Agile Coach, and attended by the whole product team.
Of course, those teams would have worked together through the whole research process, so nothing should be new information as they review the research findings and problem charts.
You don’t need any special tools — just pens, post-it notes, stickers and paper. Online, Trello or Miro or anything like that which you are already using works fine.
If you are working in sprints, you are working to a goal, with a tangible output. Before starting the workshop, I tell people what they’ll have by the end of it: a sketch/description of an idea from which a product will be developed.
Yes, ideas will be dropped along the way. That’s the whole point! Over 90% of all new products fail because there was no market need, so the trick is to speed up the rate at which those weaker ideas fail, and increase the total number of ideas per year going into that funnel, so you get a higher ‘hit rate’ of successful ideas.
The main reason I have seen UX professionals leave their role was because they didn’t get to express their ideas. This way, everybody gets to express their ideas, but they get tested and validated and only the ones that pass the tests move forward.
Proper ideation involves individual and group ideas. Brainstorming is best done alone, but divergent thinking is best done together: I normally give people 5–10 minutes to individually write down ideas, and then add them to the board, and then we discuss them together in a “yes, and …” format.
Convergent thinking comes towards the end of the workshop: that’s the part where you pick holes in the bad idea. That’s useful and stops you wasting money on building the wrong thing, but needs to come after the crazy, bad ideas have been expressed, which usually lead to the good and sensible ideas.
(Think, for a moment, about why amphetamines are prescribed to people with ADHD: when the brain is relaxed, ideas flood in, but it is difficult to focus. When the brain is aroused, the focus narrows: efficiency at the expense of creativity. This is why comfortable clothes are recommended for ideation workshops: you don’t want anything that will make you feel tense.)
Yes, Design Thinking works, and it is applied every day at organisations building products for millions of users, and yes it can integrate well with Agile.
It just has to start with understanding customers to avoid making beautiful products that nobody buys.
