From the course: Design Thinking: Understanding the Process

Agile, lean, and design thinking

From the course: Design Thinking: Understanding the Process

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Agile, lean, and design thinking

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- To quickly contextualize design thinking. I like to describe it as a technique to bring business and technology partners together, uncover and create solutions for real user needs, and quickly test whether those solutions really will generate business benefit before you invest time in coding. It's a great starting point for any lean or agile process. Lean is at its heart a business process to test new ideas quickly and get to business benefit faster by using the feedback from those tests to decide what elements of the product to work on next. Agile, another rapid development techniques are technology processes you use to build new ideas quickly and then test those ideas using the things you learned from the tests to drive the next iteration. Again, the aim is to deliver a product that has business benefit sooner. Design thinking provides you with an on ramp to the lean and agile processes. It's a combination of your first lean research and hypothesis testing and your first agile iteration. In fact, the activities within a design thinking exercise are often called by different names in the agile world. For instance, a design sprint or iteration zero. That's not to say that you have to be following lean or agile processes for design thinking to work. I imagine it's possible to use design thinking to start a fully waterfall process. However, I wouldn't want to and it'll be easier to adopt design thinking if your team already follows lean processes or rapid development techniques. I intend to spend a little bit of time putting design thinking into context, but the things I really want to get across in this course is how you in your own organization can use the design thinking process to build better products and get your best ideas to market sooner. Most of the point, I want to emphasize that you can do it yourself and probably more thoroughly than if you engage some of the agencies out there today.

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