- I'm not going to talk much in this course
about the justifications and benefits
of running a design thinking exercise.
I have a companion course to this one
called understanding design thinking
which goes into all that.
It also talks a bit more detail
about how to persuade people to attend.
But let's talk a little bit about that commitment here.
You're going to be asking a group of 10 to 15 people
at your company to give you about a week of their time,
probably in one intensive chunk.
Each time I work with a company to implement design thinking
I get pushed back about this.
Every time at the end of the week,
everyone there says they couldn't think
of a better use of their time.
Obviously some people have existing commitments
that they can't get out of,
but I don't, can't a weekly status update meeting
as a commitment.
The world won't end if that status update
is delayed by a week.
Let people know what's expected of them
but also let them know what they'll get from this process.
By participating in the design thinking session
each of the attendees is going to end up
with a much deeper understanding
of what product you're going to build,
or why you're going to build it.
Each of them will use that understanding
for different purposes.
Developers, for instance, will find it easier
to provide accurate cost estimates for the project.
And that have more insight into why the interface
is laid out in a particular way,
or why as a team you decided
to use one technology over another.
Marketing on the other hand,
will gain deep insight into customer needs.
So they can craft messages
that appeal to people in just the right way.
Operations take something completely different away.
They begin to understand your staging requirements
for the production environment.
So they can work out how much capacity
your product will need when it launches.
And so it goes, each individual brings their own expertise
and takes away critical information
that helps them in their work.
And that makes it clear why they have to commit to attend
for the entire week.
Being gone for an hour might hold up the entire team
because they aren't there to answer a question.
Missing even one stage of the design thinking process
will mean they have to spend time getting caught up,
which slows everyone else down too.
The idea is that you work as a team.
I can guarantee at least that by the end of the week,
if you do this right,
you'll definitely feel much more like you're a team.