- Design thinking processes can be performed
in as little as one intensive week
or can take as long as you feel is necessary
to really understand and validate solutions
to your users' issues.
Representatives from every discipline need to be involved
in a design thinking exercise.
Business, IT, marketing,
legal, design, user research,
tests, ops and so on.
This is the only way to ensure
that all the different perspectives are covered
and that everyone is on the same page.
There are some other groups in your organization
who need to be aware of what you're doing,
so they can give input,
but they probably don't need to be there
all the time every day.
I like to run 20 minute demos every morning
to show what we did the day before.
Some people you should invite to those demos are legal,
your internationalization or localization team,
technical architects and any other specialist groups
who'll need to be involved later in the process.
Obviously, some of these roles might not exist
in your organization.
There might be reasons
why some of these people wouldn't attend.
I'm giving you this list as an indication
of the breadth of experience that you want in the room
when you run this session.
After hearing me say that,
you're already thinking
that this is an expensive undertaking,
because it takes time from all these people's schedules.
The thing is they'll all be involved at some point.
It's either now upfront gaining a common understanding
or it's later on in a never ending line of meetings
where you have to go over the justifications
for the project time and time again.
And to be honest,
what else really should these people be doing
at the definition phase of a project?
Design thinking helps every discipline get clearer
about what their role will be,
what tasks they need to perform
and what type of support they'll need to provide
as the project moves forward.