As a product manager, you try to turn business objectives into reality.
Generally that involves finding important user problems to address, and creating workable solutions to those problems.
Moving from objectives to reality - finding the right problems and solutions - is a messy business. There are no guaranteed paths to success, and especially at the beginning chaos and confusion reign.
But if we persevere and have a little bit of luck we can gradually tease out the important insights, the interesting concepts and narrow down on a solution that creates real value for users and the business.
Daniel Newman captures the uncertainty and emotion of this process with his Design Squiggle.
Whilst you can never escape the messiness of the creative process, design thinking provides us with a mental model to help us navigate it. This gives us the best chances of reducing risk and building something of value.
Why is it important?
Design thinking forms the basis of product development for several reasons:
- Minimizes risk - the creative process is inherently risky - novel things are untested, and this risk cannot be completely eliminated. But design thinking helps reduce risk as much as possible.
- User-centric - it uncovers user needs, and leads to solutions that users value.
- Results orientated - as a result of minimizing risk, it helps teams consistently deliver impactful features that make a meaningful difference to our core business metrics.
- Innovative - it encourages diverse ideas and an iterative process that leads to more creative and ultimately better solutions to complex problems.
- Fast and flexible - the process can be time bound to fit a particular deadline or scaled to tackle especially difficult problems.
What is design thinking?
Design thinking evolved as a formal concept in the mid-20th century, gaining momentum in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was influenced by various fields, including engineering, business, and architecture. A significant milestone in its development was the British Design Council's introduction of the Double Diamond Framework in 2005.
This framework presented a visual representation of the design process, emphasizing the two-phase approach of diverging (exploring an issue more broadly or deeply) and converging (taking focused action), embodied in two diamonds.
At the same time, the global design and innovation firm IDEO played a pivotal role evangelizing the approach, and championing empathy, collaboration, and rapid prototyping. The methodology was further popularized by Google's Design Sprints, a five-day process streamlining product development and decision-making, blending design thinking's principles with the tech industry's fast-paced innovation culture.
Phases of the process
This article will describe a modern synthesis of design thinking inspired by Dan Nessler’s writing. As he notes himself, you’ll probably have heard of similar terms and processes, and may prefer slightly different descriptions yourself. That is absolutely fine.
What we aim to do here is present an effective, simple and practical framework that anyone can use as a starting point.
We think of the development process as being split into two halves:
- Problem space - picking the right problem to solve.
- Solution space - designing the right solution to the problem.
Each of these halves has two main phases:
- Problem space
- Research - understanding the problem space that users face.
- Focus - narrowing down on a specific problem to solve.
- Solution space
- Ideation - generating potential solutions to the problem.
- Iteration - iteratively improving and shipping one particular solution.
The four phases alternate between divergent and convergent ways of working:
- Divergent (Research & Ideation) - opening ourselves up without limits to understand the full spectrum of possibilities
- Convergent (Focus & Iteration) - focusing on and refining one particular idea to make it as tight as possible
Such a neat model is inevitably a very loose approximation of what the messy business of design really looks like. However, its value is not as a description of what product development looks like, but as a tool for helping us think through the challenges we’re facing and figuring out where to act.
If things go wrong, we can diagnose where they went off track, using Facebook’s Understand / Identify / Execute model:
- Did we misunderstand the problem space?
- Did we choose the wrong solution?
- Did we execute poorly?
Structured discovery allows us to zero in on where we went wrong, and therefore what our next steps should be.
We’ll run through each of these four phases in more detail, once we’ve covered some ground rules to get the most out of design thinking.
Ground Rules
Whichever phase you are in, bear in mind these principles to help you achieve the best results.
Hypothesis-driven & time bound
Whilst design thinking can help you reduce risk, you can never have complete certainty. As a result, it’s easy to become detached from the urgency of delivering user value and sucked into a never-ending quest to find the perfect answer. Without some sort of constraints you can easily disappear into months of discovery, searching for absolute certainty before you act.
The antidote to this is to be hypothesis driven and set yourself a time limit on how long you want to spend on discovery. Being hypothesis driven focuses your efforts on supporting or disproving a specific hypothesis, rather than doing open-ended research. And being time bound forces you to accept that you can’t remove uncertainty completely, and need to act eventually. In most cases, after two weeks you’re better off starting on delivery as a way of learning more, rather than prolonging discovery further.
Interdisciplinary
Design thinking favors collaborative work across disciplines (e.g. design, engineering, operations, subject matter experts, etc.), bringing together different perspectives and expertise to solve tough problems.
But perhaps more importantly, running discovery in an interdisciplinary way and including people outside the immediate team also helps you build buy-in from other stakeholders. They can see the sausage being made. Generating stakeholder buy-in is critical to make things happen in any organization, where leaders can get nervous about product teams investing in the “fluffy” art of design if they don’t understand it.
Human-Centered Approach
At its core, design thinking focuses on understanding and empathizing with the people who use your product. You can’t create value for the business if you’re not creating value for your users. This human-centered approach ensures that solutions are tailored to meet real user needs and challenges.
Iterative
Whilst presented as a linear flow, in reality design thinking is continuous and iterative. For example, focusing on one problem leads to more research in that particular area, and shipping solutions informs the overall problem space. Whilst ideally you’d never skip phases (e.g. Iteration before Focus), you are often acting at multiple points in the double diamond at once (you’re in a prob-lution / so-blem phase). There is no end to the understanding you can gain on the problem or the effectiveness of the solutions you can build.
Three Horizons
The more innovative you are trying to be, the more time you’ll need to spend exploring the problem space, and the more time you’ll need to spend doing discovery overall. Big bets take time to pay off, because there’s a lot of uncertainty to work through.
So when you’re thinking about how much discovery you need to do, and where to start, it’s helpful to reflect on which of three “horizons” you are aiming for:
- Maintain & Defend - This horizon represents the current core business and primary source of revenue. Work here is about optimizing existing features to get the most out of them for as long as possible. If you’re acting here, then the problem space will generally be well understood, and you’ll spend a lot more time in the solution space.
- Nurture & Grow - This horizon is about emerging opportunities that have the potential to become future revenue streams. These might be big new features or even new products. Horizon 2 initiatives are more innovative than Horizon 1 and you’ll need to balance your time across all four phases of discovery.
- Create & Disrupt - This is the space of radical innovation. Here, the focus is on exploring completely new ideas and technologies that could create future opportunities but are highly uncertain. These ideas might disrupt the current business model or create entirely new markets. Horizon 3 is about long-term thinking and often involves spending a lot more time in exploring the problem space than working on solutions.
Overall, you generally want to spend most of your time on Horizon 1 initiatives, some time in Horizon 2 and a little time in Horizon 3. You can reflect on this and communicate it to others by mapping your backlog onto the three horizons and seeing what proportion of your time you’re spending working on initiatives in each. It’s usually a warning sign if you’re neglecting one horizon completely (the exception being pre-product-market fit, where you’ll want all your focus on finding that).
Design Thinking
Let’s run through each of the phases in more detail, describing the typical activities you might be doing, and how this might look across different time frames.
