Markets are changing faster than ever. Driven by expediential changes in technology, customers want more personalized experiences and they want it now. How do you keep up with the ever-changing market landscape and deliver high-quality products and services? No matter how deep our up-front understanding is of our market, we really cannot predict our customers’ … Read more
In Agile Development, a “sprint” is one iteration of a continuous development cycle. Within a sprint, planned amount of work has to be completed by the team and made ready for review. During the sprint: No changes are made that would endanger the sprint goal Quality goals do not decrease Sprints are limited to a … Read more
Customer journey maps are a visualization of the journey that your customers go through to understand and engage with your organization. They tell a story from when a prospective customer first heard about you, through first contact and into a (hopefully) long-term relationship. Customer journey maps are a tool for your organization to measure customer … Read more
Empathy is the tool that we use to gain understanding. Understanding leads to insights. Insight is what informs experiments. Experimentation results in innovation. Empathy is the experience of understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings, and condition from their point of view, rather than from your own. You try to imagine yourself in their place in order to understand what … Read more
As previously discussed, Design Thinking means thinking like a designer. It is not so much a process but a mindset. There is a process that designers follow… in the simplest of terms, it is research, design and test. Designers do have a bias to designing. They want to create elegant solutions that make peoples’ lives … Read more
Design Thinking is a discipline – a mindset. A way of thinking – not a process. Thinking like a designer, Design Thinking applies the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and a viable business strategy. The process follows the designer’s methodology from vision to implementation. Starting with understanding … Read more
We are constantly making decisions. Some are small and some are big like “should I have the oatmeal or the eggs?” or “How are we going to win our market?” In your mind, you frame your problem and think through different solutions that will give you the best results. You may even think through a … Read more
Human-Centered Design (HCD), as the name implies, is designing solutions around people. HCD involves the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process by observing the problems within context, brainstorming, conceptualizing, developing, and implementing a solution. It is the process that innovators like Apple and IDEO follow. In this process, you first need to clearly define the problem then … Read more
Prototype your ideas before you develop them. Use prototypes to solicit feedbacks from subject matter experts to ensure you are solving the right problem, to inform stakeholders, get feedback from your customers, and collaborate with development. Before you write your requirements, create a “prototype.” This could be a sketch – or sketches – on a … Read more
In the O’Reilly article, Design thinking and data science: Solving problems with data necessitates a diversity of thought, Dean Malmgren from Datascope and Jon Wettersten from IDEO shares: “Problem solving not only requires a high-level conceptual understanding of the challenge, but also a deep understanding of the nuances of a challenge… Solving problems with data necessitates a … Read more
Design Thinking is an iterative process. In the larger context, we understand then explore then materialize our solution. Every step of the way is iterative. What we learn in one step of the process may cause us to go back and refine what we learned in a previous step. Especially when we prototype our ideas … Read more
In the creative process, you start with an idea. You explore aspects of that idea – go wide – and diverge into many directions to better understand and define your problem. You follow many paths – some lead to dead-ends, some stray too far off from your vision and some lead to the same … Read more