Reflection on a Wonderful Journey
This semester, our Design Thinking class effectively combined writings, interactive exercises, and group projects to improve our grasp of design concepts in real-world circumstances. This has greatly increased my understanding of Design Thinking and tied it directly to my future career goals in product management. The course provided insights that are critical to good product design and management, and it will help prepare me for the difficulties and possibilities in this field.
Our journey began with the foundational step of empathizing with our target users — international students struggling with public speaking. We conducted interviews and surveys to dive deep into their experiences, fears, and needs. This empathy phase was crucial, as it informed the next steps of defining the problem clearly and moving towards finding solutions. We gained knowledge on how to communicate user demands in a way that is necessary which provided a framework for coming up with creative solutions. During the ideation phase, we were forced to think outside the box and come up with innovative features that would boost consumers’ confidence and reduce their fear.
I gained the ability to clearly define user demands in language that can be put to use, providing guidance for the creation of unique and creative solutions. This ideation phase encouraged creativity by pushing one to consider various elements that would help customers feel less anxious and more confident. The iterative design process emerged as a key focus for learning. We quickly began prototyping or putting our ideas into practice in more straightforward forms. After that, we put each prototype through extensive user testing to get crucial input that helped us make the final adjustments. We were mostly able to improve our final product by understanding real-time user reaction and practical issues through this iterative process of testing and refining prototypes.
Collaboration was another important part of our learning. Working in a diverse team allowed us to combine different viewpoints and knowledge, which was helpful in fully understanding our consumers and developing a more effective product. We discovered that effective product design requires collaborative efforts across multiple fields, including user research, technological development, and marketing. As a product manager, I will be required to lead these different teams, and the skills learned in this course will enable me to effectively manage cross-functional cooperation, ensuring that every team member contributes to their maximum capacity.
For a product manager, collaboration, empathy, and iterative development are essential skills. In addition to helping me better understand design thinking, this course has given me useful tools and techniques that I can apply in my future work to produce products that are both innovative and highly valued by consumers. I’m motivated to apply these lessons to my next position since I know they will enable me to succeed and do excellent work.
