- At it's heart design thinking is customer centered.
The process helps you identify
and fix real customer pain points.
It also gives you early measurable understanding
of which of your ideas are likely to be successful
with your customers.
If you're running a lean
or agile style project process
you'll be going through build, test, learn iteration.
Design thinking gets you started
on those iterations faster
and helps you prioritize the order in which to build things,
so that you get the most early benefit
and feedback on your ideas.
Running a design thinking exercise
means your team starts off
with a common understanding
of what they'll be building and why.
They take this understanding
through the whole development process.
It becomes much easier for any individual
to make the decisions they need to for their jobs,
because they were involved
in creating the overall plan for the project.
That means less time wasted in meetings
and less crazy looking pieces of user interface added
at the last minute.
It's also much easier to decide the project goals
because they're based on customer need
and how you can gain business benefit by meeting
that customer need.
With clear customer focus goals
feature prioritization happens faster
and with a lot fewer pet features
you know, what pet features are.
Someone on the team thinks it would be a great idea
to do a certain thing and tries to slip it
into the schedule, with a clear focus on your customers
it's much easier to deprioritize those pet features.
And design thinking also helps
with one of the most common project management nightmares.
How do you know when you're building the right the thing?
With design thinking processes
you get multiple opportunities to check in
with your potential customers
and make any necessary costs correct.
In fact, the process stops with customer interaction
and check-ins can be as frequent as every week after that.