Lean vs Design Thinking

A Product Manager’s thoughts and findings.

Published in

ART + marketing

6 min readAug 5, 2015

Lean vs Design. Data vs Empathy. Both approaches to innovation have been discussed at great length in product and startup circles over the last few years. But if you’re a Product Manager — a role occupied by people from various different backgrounds, it can be increasingly difficult to work out which approach to take and at what point in your product or feature’s life-cycle to implement either. Is it better to go MVP first and learn where to go from the data or spend time first designing user personas, hero flows and focusing on empathy? Can you use both disciplines interchangeably to get a successful outcome or are they too polarised in their views.

Let’s try and work it out.

Lean Product Management

The lean startup model applied to product management creates a very analytical approach . You’re getting out of the office, speaking with potential customers and looking for buying signals to create a value proposition, looking at the market, getting an MVP in front of potential users fast and using the data produced to drive decisions on iterations, if a ‘pivot’ is needed or find out if you’ve failed as quick as possible. Fail fast, learn fast and ship…fast! This also applies to looking at existing features and trimming the fat from a bloated product or product line, hence the name ‘Lean’. It also brings the business goals into consideration, only focusing on using resource to build what is necessary and validated upfront without waste. The goal is to quickly arrive at product market fit.

The popular lean startup loop from Eric Reis

Design Thinking applied to Product Management

Similar to Lean, Design Thinking puts the user first although more time is spent upfront with communities and target users to ‘walk in their shoes’, to gain a deep understanding of their pain points and trying to find a problem to solve, gaining empathy, using rapid design iterations to figure out what it is that will solve their problem and how they will feel once it’s solved. Similar to Lean, you then have a value proposition, but in design thinking you are trying to achieve an emotional value proposition — how the user will feel using your product and once their needs have been met. That emotional value proposition becomes your vision, the North Star which creative ideation and solutions are generated quickly around, refined through observing real world behaviours until instead of releasing an MVP, you release something more substantial that let’s the user achieve not only their goals but reach the emotional value proposition. Design thinking for Product Managers also rallies a more visual way of communicating decisions being made to the team, keeping everyone bought into the vision. Be prepared for your office post-it notes being consumed like never before. Your goal is to arrive at not only allowing the user to achieve their goals but also make them feel the emotions you set out to. This approach creates a more ‘loveable’ product.

Key Differences

Lean involves starting with a hypothesis and testing that quickly by getting an MVP in front of potential users. It also leverages data a lot more throughout the entire process, taking more of a quantitative stance on decision making and the success or failure of a feature. It also brings into consideration the business model, market position and competitor analysis.

Design thinking puts more emphasis on identifying with your target audience before making a hypothesis, humanising the process and using more qualitative data to reach innovation. It’s been said that Lean is used to make sense of the way something is to help figure out what to do next whereas design thinking is used to imagine a better future for the user and rallies around connecting with the user emotionally to figure out how to arrive at that future.

Where do they overlap?

The most recognisable crossover is both approaches put the user first. Both focus on learning and discovery, failing fast, iterating from user interactions with the product and trying to achieve goals quickly without big investments of time and money to arrive at something irrelevant — hence why both are so popular with startups.

So if Lean Startup and Design Thinking both having similar destinations, used together they should surely allow you to arrive at not just a successful product, but a loved one. Figuring out when and where to use either discipline as a PM is trickier to determine, especially for a job function that can exist in a two person startup or a multi-billion dollar corporate with staff numbers in the 100+ region.

Applying both as a Product Manager

The author of ‘Well Designed: How to use empathy to create products people love’ John Kolko believes not only figuring out what to build but also getting buy-in from other people to rally around the vision needs empathy and design artefacts in place from the start to reach innovation. Repeating the build-test-learn loop won’t reach innovation in his view but behavioural insights, UX research to empathise with the user then rapid ideation will be more likely to create something that can make an emotional connection. You should get out into the user community you’re targeting first and feel what it’s like to be in their shoes. This, for a data driven PM is likely to feel unnatural, but Jon Kolko’s application of Design Thinking to Product can give context to data and humanise the numbers. His view is this actually allows you to make better decisions, being able to give emotional context to the data produced which accelerates the learning phase of the lean cycle and allows you to iterate faster once your product is being used.

A value promise that supports “viable” is framed as a statement of transaction: “If you use our product, we promise you will be able to do these things.” But an emotional value proposition is framed as a statement of feeling: “If you use our product, we promise you will feel this way.” Our value proposition at my last startup, MyEdu, was “We promise to help college students succeed in college, tell their story, and get a job.” But our emotional value proposition was “We promise to minimize anxiety around the academic journey.” — Jon Kolko

For most Product Manager’s though, especially at a startup you’re going to have success KPI’s to measure and work towards quickly. This is where Lean can be much more useful in not only defining them, but tracking and improving. In reality, if you’re at a startup you have a key metric or a KPI that can become the #1 focus. Using Lean, you can quickly brainstorm and try improving this through experimenting with an MVP and quickly track it’s success. Split(a/b) testing can achieve a quick win solution.

Design Sprints — I recently discovered Google Ventures have an awesome approach called The Design Sprint. It feels very much like a cross between Lean and Design Thinking to focus on a problem the team faces and how to arrive at a solution by the end of the week.

Summary

The advantage that Lean has is it is undeniably fast. You can arrive at conclusions to your hypothesis much quicker than Design Thinking which, for unfunded startups (even most funded startups) is why it’s so popular. It’s perceived problem is that in a world with so many startups launching and failing daily, the one’s that are just ‘used’ and not loved are having less impact and succumb to churn. Design thinking for innovation, although slower at the start is great for deciding what problem to solve, qualitative data and setting a vision around a real problem. Combined with using Lean for quick experimentation, it’s fast paced iterations and flexibility for early stage startups both can really provide PM’s with the tools to achieve greatness.

I recently posted the article in the #Startup slack channel from the Startup Foundation and it started a great discussion. See below…