Six Design Thinking Approaches That Will Rock Your Agile Teams [#DesignThinking #AgileTeams]
1. Understand the customer’s pain
2. Identify the problem
3. Brainstorm the solution
4. Silently select
5. Prototype and test
6. Realization
1. Understand the customer’s pain
You need to understand what is causing customers’ pain. Then your developers can build a product that addresses the customers’ concerns.
2. Identify the problem
Once you have identified the customer’s pain point, you need to observe and perform data mining, or the simple process of “mining” large blocks of raw data to understand customer patterns and trends.
3. Brainstorm the solution
After the discovery phase, it is time to fix the problem.
There are two parts to this: definition and ideation.
Start your definition by gathering the information revealed during your discovery phase.
Clearly summarize the customers’ point of view, and put it in the form of a problem statement that includes a distinct outline of each issue. Tackle one problem and one problem statement at a time.
State and define the negative aspect of each problem so you can carefully address the solution.
Then it’s time to brainstorm possible solutions.
Create idea after idea to establish the greatest possible number of possibilities.
Do not place any limitations on ideas that people can suggest.
Any idea, no matter how far-fetched, should be possible during this phase.
4. Silently select
Each team member should anonymously and silently select the 3 to 5 ideas they consider to be the best.
Silent selection is critical to ensuring that there is no manipulation of or undue influence exhibited over any team member.
The majority wins, and each team is then tasked with implementing the winning ideas.
5. Prototype and test – CREATION PHASE
Once your teams have identified their top three ideas, they should create a tangible working archetype—a model of what will create and influence a positive outcome.
6. Realization
This is the implementation phase of your solution to the problem.
You’ll rely on product design, manufacturing, and the data analytics aggregated from data mining to determine if your working prototype is viable.
Pricing, quality control, contractors, management, corporate responsibility, governance, and field testing are all integral to the realization process.
So are marketing, distributing, and valuating the product for the consumer.
Your product testing should include the same consumers your company sought out to begin this process as well as broader, more diverse testing groups.
Without such testing, the process will be incomplete and you’ll have to start over.
Accurate testing using targeted and diverse consumer groups allows you to refine the product to increase your chances for success.
Understand that the problems you are addressing are not as simple as they might seem at first.
Next steps
If your organization is exploring the design thinking process for the first time, do not let the process overwhelm you.
Design thinking methodology has been around for decades and is well documented, and the process steps are clearly laid out.
Finally, diversity is an integral part of the design thinking process, so make sure you observe a diverse consumer population and gather diverse teams to ideate, implement, and learn.
Without an understanding of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs, political beliefs, or other ideologies, your design process will be more likely to fail.
6 design thinking steps that will rock your agile teams
TechBeacon