My exposure to Design Thinking

When it comes to product management here are the steps to follow.

Empathy:

The first step is to walk-in your user’s shoes (Empathy). Identify the demographics and psycho-graphics of your users. Keep asking the question “What are they trying to do?”, “Why are they doing it this way?”. Engage with your users to seek stories and their experiences. Build your stories around your persona, involve your engineers and QA’s to experience your persona stories. From this exercise build your customer journey maps.

The most recent product I had the opportunity to work on had three main persona.

The vision of the product was to humanize the patient-doctor relationship during COVID-19. The product was a tele-health solution. The user persona ‘patient’ was a very broad category, we had to think about the extreme users and the mainstream users and build stories around them.

Define:

Define the problem from the collected data and analysis, Identify the challenges, look for the surprises and connections. Reframe your problem into three components “User”, “Need”, “Insights” (observations and interpretations). Combine these components to create a Point of View (POV). As product managers, we can use abductive reasoning to reframe the problem, as this approach has space for generating ideas.

Ideate:

The third step is Ideation. this is the most interesting and collaborative task you can lead as a product manager. In this phase, we transition the POV to actionable statements. Start asking many “How might we…?” for the POV. Incorporate divergent thinking to ideate as many solutions and convergent thinking to prioritize the solutions. If you are familiar with the Agile practices this is very similar to the retrospectives, where you identify what works, group, and prioritize your ideas.

Prototype and Testing:

The final two phases are sometimes interdependent, the Prototype, and the Testing phases. Prototyping is an attitude of approaching a problem, which involves many iterations and testing simultaneously. The purpose of testing is to fail fast and fail cheap to mitigate the risk related to the final product. We need to look at this as an opportunity to learn from your failures, which means we need to revisit the problem definition, redefine your POV, and go back to the ideation board for new ideas. This iterative approach should continue throughout the product life cycle.

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Deb Gabor is the author of Branding Is Sex: Get Your Customers Laid and Sell the Hell Out of Anything. She is the founder of Sol Marketing, which has led brand strategy engagements for organizations…