Day 57 — Demystify series 5/7: “Design Thinking, System Thinking, Product Thinking”
Published in
6 min readApr 26, 2019
While lots of business schools started teaching Design Thinking, we also heard about the renaissance of System Thinking, also the rookie in the game: Product Thinking. What’s the difference? How do we know when to use what? In this article, I’m going to share my knowledge & experience of all three.
To efficiently explain the three, here’s the knowledge break down:
- What they are and why they’re important
- Key differences and typical pitfalls
- Strategy for adoption
What they are and why they’re important
- Design Thinking is a process to develop design concepts and test it out to refine the solution. Common activities include upfront research, problem framing, ideation, and prototype testing. Importance: In Design Thinking, the emphasis on developing user empathy to better understand what they really need in their context is something traditionally missing in framing business assumption and developing product requirement. Therefore Design Thinking helps the business problem of “creating something that users don’t need/want, or not really addressing their problems.”
- System Thinking is a way to analysis the problem space as a system, and to interpret the relationship of the elements in it with the hope to deduct logical patterns and identify potential solutions. Importance: When dealing with large and complex mechanism, system thinking is an effective way to break down the complexity and visualize the opportunity in the system.
- Product Thinking is a way of product design. Product Thinking encourages designer to analyze the problem space through a lens of product, instead of feature. Importance: Product thinking helps designers to generate a broader view from the whole product perspective, and to remove the downside of feature-driven solutions.
Key differences and typical pitfalls
Differences
- Intended results: [Design Thinking] is framework focusing on iterating on solutions with research, creativity, and testing. [System Thinking] is a method focusing more on the analysis process and insights generation. Last but not least, [Product Thinking] is a philosophy that serves as thinking guidelines to adjust product design direction.
- Process & activity: [Design Thinking], as a high level framework, can accommodate all kinds of design activities. Some common framework interpretations include Stanford d.School, IDEO, and IBM’s versions of interpretation. Meanwhile, [System Thinking] requires more specific tools like The Double- Q (QQ) Diagram, Behavior Over Time (BOT), Causal Loop Diagram (CLDs), etc. [Product Thinking], as a newly developed philosophy, hasn’t derive any popular or known tools yet.
Common Pitfalls
- [Design Thinking] becomes really popular in the design agency world, as it helps construct longer contract with client to design/develop product in a bigger scale. As many large scale methods /frameworks share the same blessing & curse, on one hand they are big with great tolerance for interpretations, on the other hand their flexibility results in no single golden copy of it. Some people run with their own interpretations and complaint about its ineffectiveness and short coming.
- [System Thinking] is a powerful method to get deep insights in the system. However, the learning curve of System Thinking is much steeper, therefore the adoption rate is still low in the design industry given our design education system produce more creators/innovators than thinkers. Also, it requires more time and investment in the analysis phase and it’s not as easy for stakeholders to swallow the timeline and effort required, especially in the age of Agile.
- [Product Thinking] is supposed to encourage designer to think in a product perspective, not features. However, this rise of extending designer’s role into the product world have made some product manager unease and not comfortable with this idea. In some cases, the relationship between designers and product managers transformed from partnership to territorial war.
Strategy for adoption
Now that we have a high-level understanding of what they are, what’s the difference, and what to avoid, the next is to think about how we can efficiently utilize some of these good helpers. Here are some key considerations for adoption:
- [Design Thinking] is a team sport. If your peer designers or stakeholders don’t know what it is or not ready to adopt, don’t force them to. Instead, use the concept of Show, Don’t Tell, do it in a way to quickly show value to them then explain the how it can help the team in the long run. For example, talk to some users and use their feedback to create affinity diagram, and show it to the team of how much you discovered and how it can generate great business/design solutions.
- [System Thinking] requires deep knowledge and experiences on how to do it right. If you’re already a master, great! But if not, either hire a consultant to show case how much value it can generate, or pick a simple System Thinking tool like The Double-Q (QQ) Diagram, as an icebreaker to gradually introduce the power of System Thinking.
- [Product Thinking] is a mental mindset that any one can pick up to influence decision making. For designers, a better understanding of product lifecycle and marketing 4Ps (product, price, place, promotion) can help transforming one from a design thinker to a product thinker. Other knowledge like Peter Drucker’s 5 force analysis, 6 sigma, and lean manufacturing also designers/ developers to think in a product way.
Conclusion
- All 3 Thinking(s) serve different purposes. Design Thinking is a problem solving framework, System Thinking define approaches of analysis, and Product Thinking is a way of thinking guideline.
- Design Thinking is a large framework and many different interpretations so it could be confusing and misunderstood. System Thinking requires larger investment on analysis and it’s not easy to be understood and supported. Product Thinking could trigger the debate of the ownership of work between designers and product owners.
- When it comes to adoption, Design Thinking requires the team to get onboard in order to effective conduct the exercise, System Thinking requires knowledgeable and experience individual to get it right, and Product Thinking needs to define clear ownership to foster relationship.
Are you also interested in adopting these great Thinking(s)? What’s your experience? I’d love to learn from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
