Design thinking is a human-centric approach to innovation and problem-solving that prioritizes understanding user needs, rapidly generating ideas, and continually iterating through testing and feedback. Unlike analytical thinking which focuses on hard data and metrics, design thinking taps into a more creative, collaborative, and empathetic frame of mind to uncover innovative solutions.
This design-centric process has exploded in popularity over the past decade, especially in the high-tech industry amongst companies like Apple, Google, and IDEO. However, many product managers still fail to leverage design thinking and rely solely on analytical product management techniques instead. This is a missed opportunity that can severely limit a company’s ability to create products that truly resonate with users and the market.
By stepping back, empathizing with diverse users, and expanding the solution possibilities, design thinking allows product managers to break through assumptions and identify more impactful and human-centered products to build. This holistic approach complements principles of agile development and lean startup methodologies that so many technology teams have adopted nowadays.
In this post, we will walk through the five key phases of design thinking: Empathizing, Defining, Ideating, Prototyping, and Testing. We will uncover tips for product managers to embrace design thinking to forge stronger connections with users, solve sticky problems with innovative solutions, and ultimately create products that better meet customer needs. Let’s dive in!
Empathizing with Users
The foundation of design thinking lies in developing an empathetic view of who will be using your product. Without understanding what users truly need, feel, behave, and desire, it is almost impossible to build solutions that will succeed in the real world.
As a product manager, you may have reams of qualitative data or analytics about your users. But there is no substitute for direct, deep engagement with actual users through methods like field studies, interviews, and observational research. There are several benefits to empathizing:
Discover hidden needs – Features users ask for aren’t always what they need the most. Watching real behavior provides clues to subtle but important needs.
Break assumptions and biases – It’s easy for PMs to project their worldview onto users. But we all think differently. Open and non-judgmental listening is key.
Establish an emotional connection – Understanding hopes, fears, and dreams forge stronger bonds between designer and user to fuel creative ideas.
Identify areas of opportunity – Observing various pain points and breakdowns opens up wide spaces for innovative solutions.
To effectively empathize, throw on a pair of fresh eyes and an open mindset to walk in users’ shoes. Leverage methods like:
- User interviews – Sit down with a diverse range of target users for deep one-on-one conversations about their behaviors, pain points, needs, and desires.
- Observation – Watch users interact with current solutions or prototypical concepts in their natural environment. Note subtle cues they may not directly voice.
- Surveys – Carefully crafted surveys and questionnaires can uncover additional quantitative and qualitative insights from a broader user base.
- Customer journey maps – Visualize different user segments’ end-to-end experience over time and across touchpoints to reveal emotional highs and lows.
- Empathy mapping – Capture what users think, feel, see, hear, say, and do throughout their journey in a single visualization.ajo
By investing significant time across multiple research modalities, product teams can forge profound connections with and inspiration from the users they aim to serve. This builds a reliable foundation for the rest of the design thinking process.
Defining Problems
Once you have established a deep understanding of your users through empathy, the next phase is translating your discoveries and insights into well-defined problem statements that frame specific opportunities. Effective problem definition ensures you are solving the right issues, and not just the surface symptoms.
This process involves digging below the initial requests that users state to identify root causes and paint a complete picture of the problem landscape. Rather than take what users say at face value, ask deeper questions through methods like the 5 Whys to unpack the origins underneath.
Key aspects of properly framing the problems include:
- Convert insights into “How might we…” questions. ThisConstruct open-ended problem frames that invite solutions. rather than closed yes/no questions.
- Align on point of view with stakeholders using techniques like POV mad libs. This brings clarity to the users, their needs, and the scope of issues.
- Determine which user problems have the highest priority to tackle based on criteria like user pain points, potential business impact, or team bandwidth. Place focus on the macro issues over micro frustrations.
- Avoid applying your ideas or solutions too early. Remain open and dwell in the problem space as long as possible before rushing ahead.
Defining the right problems to address will streamline your path to impactful solutions later on. Take time to frame the opportunity areas through the lens of user needs first and foremost.
Ideating Solutions
With user insights freshly mined and opportunities clearly defined, the ideation phase unleashes your team’s creativity to generate solutions aimed at the problem space. The goal here is to come up with a wide range of ideas, both reasonable and crazy, not to assess feasibility. Build on others’ ideas and riff to produce radically different concepts.
- Conduct structured brainstorms following guidelines like enforcing no judgment, encouraging wild ideas, and building on others’ concepts. Set a stretch target for a number of ideas.
- Use creative springboarding techniques like worst idea first, body storming, exaggeration, and lateral thinking to expand mental horizons
- Identify patterns and clusters among the ideas to spot insights. See where heavy engagement or energies emerge.
- Define evaluation criteria based on user needs identified earlier. This keeps you grounded in real desirability and viability metrics.
- Shortlist the most promising ideas using dot voting or similar methods. Mix ambitiously bold with reasonably executable.
The ideation process liberates thinking from constraints to unlock fresh perspectives and possibilities. Maintain engaged momentum as a team to push past obvious ideas into more ingenious territory through sustained collaborative creative work.
Prototyping
With a shortlist of potential solutions in hand, the next phase is bringing those ideas to life through prototypes that can be tested and iterated upon. Prototyping is a quick, affordable way to explore multiple possibilities before investing heavily in any one direction.
The key is creating rough, low-fidelity prototypes that capture the core essence of an idea rather than perfectly polished products. These can range from paper sketches and storyboards to role-playing an experience and digital wireframes. The goal is to identify strengths and weaknesses in concepts quickly through hands-on user engagement and feedback.
Tips for effective prototyping include:
- Match prototype fidelity to questions trying to be answered. A higher finish is not always better.
- Build multiple variations to test different aspects like interaction flows or visual language.
- Focus prototypes on key elements rather than comprehensive designs
- Devise prototypes that provide useful insights even if not functioning end products
- Share prototypes early and often with users to expand thinking and refine direction
By rapidly assembling scrappy prototypes, product managers can form an agile discovery and refinement loop with users well before engineering begins. This paves the way for more successful final products down the line.
Testing
The testing phase examines prototypes created in real-world scenarios with actual target users. The goal is to solicit feedback that uncovers flaws and opportunities early so they can be addressed immediately through rapid iteration, without the downstream costs of discovering major issues after launch.
Structured prototype testing provides both qualitative insights and quantitative data including:
- Observing emotional reactions and subtle cues that users may not self-report
- Capturing direct user feedback on what they like, dislike, and want to change
- Measuring task success, completion rates, preference ratings, and other metrics
- Comparing multiple prototypes to determine optimal designs
This constructive input fuels further ideation and prototyping work focused on the most promising directions uncovered through testing. It’s important to remain flexible, as new learnings may emerge that require rethinking entire solutions or realigning around new problems.
By continually experimenting, observing responses, and iterating RSS changes in close partnership with users, product teams significantly de-risk development cycles while working toward delightful customer-approved solutions.
Key Takeaways
The design thinking approach delivers immense benefits through its human-centric, prototype-driven, iterative style suited to complex problem-solving. By empathizing, wide-framing issues, ideating broadly, prototyping rapidly, and testing continually, product managers can expand thinking beyond analytical constraints. This paves the way for creative solutions that will better resonate in the market.
Key steps for embracing design thinking include:
- Immerse yourself in customer needs through empathy-building activities
- Frame core problems around user pain points before exploring solutions
- Generate wide solution possibilities before evaluating viability
- Create quick, inexpensive prototypes to fuel feedback
- Test and refine concepts continually with real users
This process complements existing product management best practices. By integrating design thinking into discovery and delivery cycles, product teams gain an expanded toolkit to produce innovative, customer-centric products worth selling.