How to use Design Thinking in Ongoing Product Discovery
Article by Jui Didolkar, Director UX Design
Over the course of my career, I have had the pleasure of working with a variety of product teams, each with their own unique methodologies. One approach that has recently caught my attention is a dual-track agile system. While we haven’t made it a regular part of our product development process yet, we experimented with this method and found it had several benefits.
As the name suggests, a dual-track agile system involves two separate tracks: one for discovery and one for delivery. The discovery track explores ideas to understand the problem space and develop out-of-the-box solutions without immediate technology or resource constraints, while the delivery track focuses on building and releasing those solutions.
In this article, I’ll focus primarily on the discovery track: how teams can utilize design thinking and the benefits of learning through design discovery before moving on to execution. Here at Chegg, we want to use rapid design thinking not only to uncover solutions, but to validate whether we are working on the right problem. This is where having a team dedicated to using design thinking in product discovery can help.
What is design thinking exactly?
Image by Interaction Design Foundation
The Design Thinking process is iterative, flexible and focused on collaboration between product teams and users, with an emphasis on bringing ideas to life based on how real users think, feel and behave.
Design Thinking tackles complex problems by:
- Empathizing: understanding the human needs involved.
- Defining: re-framing and defining the problem in human-centric ways.
- Ideating: generating several possible solutions in ideation sessions.
- Prototyping: adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping.
- Testing: developing a testable prototype/solution to the problem.
How design thinking helped us during product discovery
Utilizing design thinking can benefit any project, not just a dedicated discovery track. However, when we tried incorporating long-term, blue-sky thinking into our work, we felt it deeply validated these principles of design thinking:
Time-boxed: Design thinking doesn’t have to take a lot of time, especially when a team is fully dedicated to a specific problem space. Depending on the scale of the problem, focused design sprints can complete the entire process in 1–3 weeks.
Challenge assumptions: Through design thinking, teams get a chance to break down even the largest and most ambiguous problems. They can take a high-level view, challenge assumptions, truly understand needs, reframe the problems, and iterate on solutions quickly.
Tight collaboration: Focused time and techniques like journey mapping, questioning & ideation help bring the cross-functional team together fast and align on a direction.
Low-cost validation: With user research sessions, we can test our ideas rapidly without writing a single line of code. A lot of ideas can also be filtered based on the analysis of problem space using methods like journey mapping, concept mapping, service blueprinting, etc.
Deeper understanding & better execution planning: At the end of the process, teams come out with a richer understanding of what problem they are trying to solve and tested solutions. This gives teams high confidence in their hypothesis, which leads to better estimation and resource planning when the project goes into the development track.
Overall, a discovery track can enjoy the flexibility of tackling a challenging, complex problem without the typical constraints of the existing product, technology or resources. As the best ideas naturally arise through the design thinking process, teams can change course or reframe the original problem entirely. Once they’ve aligned on a direction, the delivery track can integrate it as part of their roadmap with high confidence in user value, estimation, and success.
