- Good design thinking involves all the stakeholders
who'll be responsible for building the product,
and it does so right from the beginning.
An agency or consultant might be involved
to facilitate and guide you through the process.
But like I've mentioned,
the end result should be a verified prototype
and an implementation plan,
not some nebulous concept sketches,
however sexy they look
or however well they're presented to you.
Getting all those stakeholders lined up can be hard.
You'll be asking for more time
in a more concentrated timescale
than they're used to giving.
At a minimum,
you'll need people from the business owners group,
product management, project management, development, test,
operations or implementation, design,
user research, marketing, and market research.
You might also want to keep legal,
any international or localization people,
and other vendor representatives
or specialist roles in your organization up to speed,
even if they don't attend the whole design thinking process.
You'll have IT and business representatives working together
in the same room rather than writing documents
to throw back and forth between each other.
Sometimes this makes people feel uncomfortable.
We're breaking down the barriers to good cooperation.
Those barriers have helped people control their own fiefdoms
for a while, so they may feel vulnerable.
It's good to be able to replace the focus on job roles
with a new focus.
That focus is their customer.
It's traditionally been quite hard
to get a bunch of technologists
to empathize about customer issues.
The lovely thing about design thinking
is that it's a systematic approach
with a set of steps
that shows the team how user data translates
into a usable and valuable user interface.
This systematic approach to customer empathy
is a main selling point of design thinking, in my mind.
It's great to see team members
who normally have a hard time understanding user problems
suddenly have an aha moment
when they first understand
that they really are different from their customers
and then go on to develop elegant solutions
because they have a newfound respect for customer needs.
In the next section,
we'll talk more about customer focus
by stepping through the design thinking process.