- To quickly contextualize design thinking.
I like to describe it as a technique to bring business
and technology partners together,
uncover and create solutions for real user needs,
and quickly test whether those solutions
really will generate business benefit
before you invest time in coding.
It's a great starting point for any lean or agile process.
Lean is at its heart a business process
to test new ideas quickly
and get to business benefit faster by using the feedback
from those tests to decide what elements
of the product to work on next.
Agile, another rapid development techniques
are technology processes you use to build new ideas quickly
and then test those ideas
using the things you learned from the tests
to drive the next iteration.
Again, the aim is to deliver a product
that has business benefit sooner.
Design thinking provides you with an on ramp
to the lean and agile processes.
It's a combination of your first lean research
and hypothesis testing and your first agile iteration.
In fact, the activities within a design thinking exercise
are often called by different names in the agile world.
For instance, a design sprint or iteration zero.
That's not to say that you have to be following lean
or agile processes for design thinking to work.
I imagine it's possible to use design thinking
to start a fully waterfall process.
However, I wouldn't want to
and it'll be easier to adopt design thinking
if your team already follows lean processes
or rapid development techniques.
I intend to spend a little bit of time
putting design thinking into context,
but the things I really want to get across in this course
is how you in your own organization
can use the design thinking process
to build better products
and get your best ideas to market sooner.
Most of the point, I want to emphasize
that you can do it yourself and probably more thoroughly
than if you engage some of the agencies out there today.