A Tangled Web of Customers, Products, Design Thinking and Agile

Design Thinking has seen a boom in popularity over the last decade, and so has Agile — in many forms. More often than not, those new to Design Thinking wonder if it is an Agile framework, but the answer is not quite straightforward.

Rather than jumping to a conclusion, let’s first explore what Design Thinking is. It’s a human-centered approach used to understand customers’ or users’ needs. It’s also an approach that helps narrow down the right problem to solve and come up with the right solutions to it, through the use of prototyping techniques such as paper prototypes, mock-ups and more.

While that definition might seem over-simplified, in essence, that is all there is to it. Here’s an image that shows the typical phases involved in the Design Thinking process. Minor variants of how these phases are named are spread across the Internet, but the crux of it remains the same.

Source: medium.com, Rain Lieberman

Let’s take a step back, and think of Products. Understanding customers’ needs is generally the most important part of a Product’s Lifecycle. Getting this wrong can result in failure no matter how “good” a product is. Examples of excellent products that failed due to a lack of demand can be found all over the Internet.

Design Thinking enables you to keep your customers and users in the center of your work. However, digging into our original question, if you look at its phases carefully, they seem sequential or 'Waterfall'-like in nature.

Let’s see how. You first need to Empathize with your customers and/or users – conduct market research, interviews, etc. – and then Define the problem you need to solve. Once you’ve completed this, you can Ideate, come up with ideas to fix the problem, and based on the ideas, create Prototypes that will act as low-cost, minimalistic versions of your actual solution or product. You then Test your prototypes with a few of your prospective customers or users early and often to ensure that you’re actually meeting their needs.

Alternate interpretations also showcase Design Thinking using an infinity loop. Here’s an example:

Source: maqe.com, Karl S.

It’s tempting to relate this representation to DevOps or Agile and make an assumption that this is an Agile framework. However, the entire sequence of steps might not quite be iterative. Prototyping and testing can and should be done in an iterative manner, but you might not always return to the first three steps after they’ve been concluded.

This doesn’t entirely take us away from the thought that Design Thinking seems to follow 'Waterfall', but there are elements of Agile that are leveraged in this iterative process.

On the other hand, some Practitioners opine that Design Thinking is instead Agile, and that you can fit all the Design Thinking phases in two-to-four week-long Sprints.

It might perhaps seem a bit too ambitious to go from understanding your customers to finding a solution to coming up with a prototype in two-to-four weeks. Fitting these phases within a two-to-four-week Sprint makes the process 'Scrum-a-fall', a strange combination of Scrum and Waterfall. Another downside is that you don’t have a shippable increment right away – one of the core tenets of Agile or Scrum.

This however doesn’t mean that Design Thinking cannot fit into the Agile world, or that the two cannot go hand-in-hand (and quite well, at that).

Design Thinking has a variety of techniques which can be used by the new age Product Owners to connect with the real problem their customers and/or users face, and to build solutions that make a real difference.

Besides this, there are hundreds of tools related to Design Thinking that open up ways to 'fail fast and learn fast' through the use of prototypes. Several of these tools and techniques enable Leaders, Product Managers/Owners and their teams to live one of the values in Agile Manifesto, “Individuals and Interactions over Process and Tools”.

In conclusion, Design Thinking isn’t quite an Agile framework. It’s a process which can be combined with Agile frameworks to get the best out of the two.

Coucal can help your organization with your customers’ and users’ needs through Design Thinking workshops, and an expert selection of techniques that match your organization’s needs, spanning all the phases of your Product’s lifecycle.

Leaders, Product Managers/Owners and teams can leverage customized workshops that zoom-in or zoom-out to let all levels in your organization focus on delivering value to your customers.

At Coucal, our approach to delivering value is helping our customers achieve outcomes over outputs. Along with the outcomes from the workshops, we provide a toolbox of practices and techniques that ensure you and your organization can continue working towards successfully delivering value to your customers.

Connect with our experts to set up a workshop that suits your needs.