4. Design Thinking

§Every methodology in this part is profiled the same way: what it gave us, what it assumes, where it breaks. Design Thinking goes first because it gave us the most and assumes the most.

§ 4.1What it gave us#

§Two ideas, both now so absorbed into product practice that they feel obvious.

§Empathy as the starting point. Before Design Thinking, most product processes began with requirements: someone decided what was needed and wrote it down. IDEO's practice, as Tim Brown described it in the 2008 Harvard Business Review essay that gave the movement its name, began instead with observation: go where the people are, watch what they do, notice what they do not say. The Stanford d.school turned this into the first step of a five-step process, Empathize, and the word stuck. The contribution was a claim: you do not know the problem until you have watched someone have it.

§Build to think. The second idea is that a rough prototype is a way of understanding, not a way of delivering. Make the idea tangible early, put it in front of people, and let their reaction teach you what you actually meant. This inverted the old order, in which thinking was finished before building began, and it is the direct ancestor of every prototype-first discipline since, including the sprint this book describes.

§ 4.2What it assumes#

§Read the process guides and the assumptions surface quickly. Design Thinking assumes a team: several people, cross-functional, in a room, with a facilitator holding the process. It assumes time: days of observation, walls of notes, rounds of ideation. It assumes that the hard part is generating good ideas, which is why so much of the method is about divergence, sticky notes and the suspension of judgment. And it assumes the organization around the team will implement what emerges, which is why the method is quiet about business viability.

§Those assumptions were true where the method was born: in consultancies and large companies, where the scarce thing was permission to think differently and the bottleneck was ideas.

§ 4.3Where it breaks at one to five#

§At a startup the bottleneck was never ideas. Founders have too many. The bottleneck is knowing which one is worth the runway, and Design Thinking, applied whole, spends the runway on the part a founder least needs.

§The workshop is the first casualty. A team of three does not need a facilitated session to hear each other; it needs one of them to go and sit with a customer. The suspension of judgment is the second: a startup cannot afford to defer the question of whether anyone will pay, and a method that pushes viability to the end pushes it past the point where the money runs out. Natasha Jen's much-shared 2017 critique lands hardest here: a process that produces sticky notes and a deck can feel like progress while producing nothing that a stranger could use.

§ 4.4What to keep#

§Empathy, meaning observation before opinion. Build to think, meaning the cheapest possible artifact in a stranger's hands. Both are load-bearing in the rest of this book. The rest of the method, the phases, the workshops, the facilitation, is scaffolding for organizations that need help behaving like a startup. A startup already is one.

§He was right, and the smallest teams can take the thinking without the ceremony.