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How To Successfully Adopt Design Thinking

Forbes Technology Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Charles Chu

Design thinking -- creative problem-solving that focuses on addressing the needs of users -- is a technique I've used to improve overall company results and customer satisfaction. After all, understanding and addressing your customers’ needs will help you create better products. But using design thinking successfully can be tricky. Missteps in socializing the concept, onboarding teams and implementing processes can cause serious headaches. After putting design thinking into use on four different teams, I’ve had plenty of breakthroughs -- and mistakes -- that you can learn from. Here’s what I’ve learned:

Do: Change the mental model.

The traditional mental model of software development focuses on engineering resources and product launch dates as the two key metrics of success. Changing that mindset requires education and steady evangelism, but it’s necessary in order to adopt design thinking. Remember, design thinking focuses on the needs of the user, so the first priority should be understanding the target market segment and user adoption. These are much better indicators of product success than how many resources are coding over how many days or weeks.

Don’t: Treat v1 as a beta.

"Let’s get it out there, get feedback and then we iterate and improve" is a common refrain. This has two interesting implications:

1. It assumes the market is forgiving. It's not. Recovering from an unpolished product launch is an uphill battle. The level of polish on your product when the market gets their hands on it is a strong indicator of long-term success.

2. It wastes your opportunity to make a first impression -- and you’ve wasted the opportunity with the early adopters who would otherwise be your best evangelists or customer references.

Do: Educate up and across the org.

This step is nonnegotiable, particularly if you’re adopting design thinking within one team -- and the rest of the company isn’t on the same page. If design thinking is new at your company, you have to overcome resistance and inertia. Educating up the chain of command -- and across divisions -- is key to successful adoption. Define and communicate clear milestones, share ongoing progress reports and evangelize your successes.

Don’t: Target the biggest impact with the first project.

This one may seem counterintuitive. It may be tempting to start with a big product launch so that your new design thinking model can generate big returns as soon as possible. It sounds great, but the larger the project, the more challenging the implementation. Here’s why: You’re starting with a mismatch in expertise. High-impact projects are assigned to developers and product managers with years or even decades of experience. If you try and upend their well-established process and workflow, they’ll likely ask, “What’s the new person with no knowledge of our products and industry going to tell us that we don’t already know?”

Starting with that credibility gap on day one makes it even harder to overcome entrenched culture and methodology. Design becomes a competing function that’s prioritized in the backlog.

Do: Target new product introduction for your first design thinking project.

Instead, start with something new. On a new product, the entire team is more likely to come to the table with an open mind, less bias and less implied influence due to years of expertise on similar launches. When your team is stacked with open-minded members from across functional areas, they approach process less dogmatically. That allows you to pitch design thinking to a more willing audience.

To expand upon that foundation, be open and transparent throughout the product build with regular demos to the rest of the organization. Demos are an excellent opportunity to reinforce concepts like user personas, journeys and more. Plus, they give you a chance to further educate, influence and ask for input.

As long as you get people on board from the start and move forward thoughtfully, design thinking can have a major impact on your bottom line. A solid understanding of your customer, in my experience, leads to stronger product offerings, a more focused organization and better business results.

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