Why Try Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a repeatable and scalable approach to problem solving and innovation. It helps teams uncover the true needs of users, and then provides a framework for responding to those needs by way of a series of rapid ideation sessions, prototypes and experiments.

Are you considering how to make use of Design Thinking within your organization? This post talks about why I chose to focus on it and the benefits I hope to achieve.

So, I lead the user experience and design teams within the Cloud Security group at Cisco. This is a really cool gig because we are a fast growing “startup” within a larger more established business group and as a result we get to solve some really interesting customer and design problems.

Last year as part of strategy planning for the team we chose to really focus on adopting a more formalized design thinking framework for our cross functional teams to adopt (Product Design, Product Management (PM) and Engineering).

Its been an incredibly interesting journey so far and I wanted to start writing about my experiences so that I can hopefully learn from others as much as they can perhaps learn from us.

This is the first in a series of posts on the subject and I hope it generates good conversation.

So with that context in mind, lets backup for a moment and explore WHY I decided to focus on Design Thinking as a strategic initiative in the first place.

Taking Stock

Back in December of last year, like many folks who strive to improve their practice and their teams, I was looking at the end of the year as a way to reflect on what we have accomplished and what we should do to up our game. I took the typical approach of looking at all the great work that my team had accomplished (something fun that all leaders should do) and then I got into more of a SWOT analysis on the team and how we work. I talked to people on the team and to people that surround the team (product managers, executives, and engineers) and I started to reveal some interesting insights and here they are:

1. The team is amazing!

First off, I’m continually amazed at how great the people are that I get to work with every day. They are smart, talented, passionate and well pretty fun.

Here are a couple of them… yeah you get the idea :)

2. We are great at solving problems

Aside from the great people, I realized we had a high functioning design team that was great at iterating on designs with customers… identifying assumptions and working to quickly validate those assumptions. Sure there were things we could improve (there always are) but in general we were great at taking problems that had been identified and defined by Product Management, and working with PM to solve those problems in our designs.

3. We are still not getting involved early enough.

I also discovered was that we still were not getting involved in the research and discovery around new capabilities as early as we would like. This was still primarily a PM job, and don’t get me wrong, they do great work, but I was convinced that there was value to be had by making it more of a team sport, bringing different perspectives to the work and ultimately helping to dig deeper to uncover the underlying need.

4. Engineers felt disconnected

The engineers felt removed from the discovery of the problem, they felt disconnected from the customers, and often asked themselves why we were choosing to solve particular problems, and even more so wondered why we were solving those problems in a particular way that might be at odds with technical constraints or technical opinions.

5. Teams were not operating as teams

I’ll admit this is more an insight I have developed over the past year and wasn’t so obvious back then… but as much as we attempted to have cross functional full stack teams (PM, Eng, Design etc) we were NOT really operating as teams. We still worked very silo’d within those teams which is a why I think the engineers felt the way they did.

Based on these insights I wanted to define a path for continuing to improve the team

We needed to ensure we could continue to develop the strengths of the team, but also start to get more involved early in the research/strategy phase and also how we could involve our engineering brothers and sisters in a more meaningful way.

Based on my past experiences I knew that the design thinking approach would tick all those boxes. Here is why:

Design thinking builds shared empathy and uncovers true user needs

Design thinking by nature helps a team develop that strong strategy around a product or a capability. It forces the team to build empathy for the user and really start understanding the WHY behind what we plan to do. It allows us to run experiments with customers to uncover their needs in a way that is far more productive than asking them what they want.

Design Thinking encourages us to FIRST figure out the right things to do, and THEN we can figure out how to do those things right. — Hallgrim Sagen

Design Thinking is collaborative by nature

Design thinking is by nature a team sport. The more people you involve, the more successful it is. All through the process we benefit from different perspectives and the ability to reframe the data in front of you.

Design Thinking encourages prolific ideation

When its time to start solving problems, Design Thinking is all about making sure we don’t just run with our first ideas. We are encouraged to explore and experiment with solutions to ensure that the most impactful solutions move forward.

Design Thinking integrates well with Lean/Agile development

In many ways, Design Thinking is synonymous with being Lean and Agile. Its about making things and then putting those things into the hands of customers and learning from them.

Its all about rapid experimentation!

We have a winner!

So I think it became pretty clear to myself, my teams and my fellow leaders that a consistent Design Thinking framework was a valuable thing to pursue and so we set off on a course to implement it.

In this series of blog posts I’ll talk about:

• The Cisco Design Thinking framework and how it came to be
• What has my experience been in introducing this way of working to the teams
• What are the plans for this year.