- The way I've been talking about design thinking,
and the amount of hype it gets in the press
would lead you to believe that it's the magic solution
to all your product development issues.
That's obviously not true.
It takes commitment from the whole team,
they'll be locked in a room together
for a week or more not doing their regular jobs,
that might make them anxious or upset.
But the truth is, by taking that upfront time,
it will save each of them a bunch of time later on.
Coding will happen faster and more accurately,
marketing won't need to have so many meetings
to try and understand exactly
what the product's supposed to do,
planners will have a high level outline
of what needs to happen.
And more importantly, everyone on the team
will share a vision of what they want to achieve,
and an understanding of the steps it will take to get there.
Design thinking also stops you from building dumb things
that some executive thought were a great idea,
because you can go through
a really quick test and learn cycle.
You also get much more creative solutions
to your problems because you've involved people
from across the organization.
Magic works by hiding
what's really happening behind in illusion.
Design thinking works the other way.
It makes customer's needs very apparent
and put some at the center product design.
Every step in the design thinking process
builds on the initial user observations you perform.
In that regard, design thinking is even better than magic.