Intro to learning design thinking

- Design thinking has been around since the 1950's. It was first introduced as a novel way to approach business challenges. Much later people began applying design thinking to product design, such as digital products, as well as product development. Applying design thinking to design a development processes quickly proved its value. How? It effectively de-risk go to market plans. Let me explain that statement a bit further. Go to market is when a business invest the time and resources to bring a new product or feature to market, and de-risking is simply an efficient way of saying reduce risk. So companies discovered that applying design thinking was an effective tool in reducing the risk of developing new products. What other values does design thinking provide? Inherently, design thinking is both customer centric and iterative. These two traits, compliment product success and delivery. And by delivery I mean how we deliver a product to market, that may include development, production, and distribution. Or another way to look at it, how we create and put it into the hands of our customers. If a product solves a real problem and as delightful to use, people will buy it, use it often, and tell others. Success, that makes it hard to compete against as well, because another company has to convince people who are happy with one product to use another. The best way to ensure that you solve a real problem is to make the solution customer centric. We do that by learning what real customers need desire and how they behave. Design thinking is a great tool for discovering these. On the other hand, as product development teams apply design thinking, they can actually take advantage of the iterative nature of learning what works and trying new solutions. In this use, iterative is how you learn what works and what does not come up with a better potential solution and try it again. This repetitive cycle enables you to rapidly learn new things and then try applying it again. This works nicely with new versions of products being developed to stay competitive in the market. It also works very well with digital product development processes like Agile that utilize iterative approaches. Design thinking provides value, from solving business problems to product design, it's great at making sure the product is a good fit with the needs of customers. Being customer focused and iterative the process of informed refining is a powerful way to be more customer-focused. Because it ensures you're solving the right problem for the right people while continuing to deliver and compete in the market.