Depending on who you speak to, you’re likely to hear varying definitions of “design thinking”. Largely speaking, Design Thinking is a mental model to help architect systems and processes that improve & scale with time.
Design Thinking is used to ideate massively complex systems, which makes it a fantastic framework for startup founders. It’s also a very iterative process, which aligns extremely well with startup best practises (the Lean Startup).
There are generally 5 steps to design thinking.
- Empathize - Strong startups start with the customer. Your entire company philosophy should align around being customer-first.
- Define - Learn & understand your users. Don’t build your startup being solution centric - every decision has to start from an insight about you customer’s deepest needs.
- Ideate - Given what you learn about your users, and coming from a perspective of empathy, ideate solutions that most efficiently solve your customer concerns with your existing resources.
- Prototype - Built the minimum acceptable product to meet the requirements of your ideation phase. The goal of this step is to optimize for resources - this should fundamentally be an exceedingly agile step.
- Test - This is where the Design Thinking process jives with the lean startup methodology so well. After building a prototype, get users testing it immediately. What’s next? Easy - you start back at step 1, and rinse and repeat.
Design Thinking isn’t an immensely complicated process, nor is it a very sophisticated method – instead, it offers a very straightforward method of ideating and iterating to the most efficient problem-solution pairs to address your target market.
The most important feature of Design Thinking is arguably the most important insight anyone can have about startups – it all starts with a deep, authentic compassion for your users and their problems.
