How Might A Balanced Team Traverse The Build Measure Learn Cycle, Design Thinking and Agile Development—combined?

Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Balanced Team and Agile Development — can we connect these concepts? Let’s give it a whirl. READY SET GO!

Design Thinking + Balanced Team =

You may have seen this Venn diagram from the d.School:

Now imagine a small, collaborative team with a single member from each of those groups: something like one engineer to represent technology, one product strategist to represent business and one designer to represent human values. As a symbol for the purpose of this ramble, consider the intersection of these three circles:

From Venn to Reuleaux, distilling a shape for Balanced Team

Let this Reuleaux triangle symbolize the synthesis of Design Thinking and Balanced Team.

Design Thinking + Lean Startup =

The first graphic below is, again, from the d.School — the visualization of their Design Thinking process. The build-measure-learn loop is a fundamental part of Lean Startup. Combined, we have a Design Thinking Loop.

Now let’s pull it together!

Here we have a balanced team, symbolized by the Reuleaux triangle, ready to traverse a Design Thinking Loop. Imagine that three-person team again — designer, engineer, and strategist — working together through a Design Thinking cycle. After they test, they draw insights and bring fresh knowledge back to a new round of empathizing, starting the circle over again.

What About Agile?

Let’s assume the team has just ideated and has already traversed the cycle at least once. There is a prototype that has been tested and now the team is ready to bring ideas into action again. At this point, production development might begin. The team has defined a core experience and found Product/Market fit. The business is ready to build it, to get out of the garage.

Add an Agile circle to the Design Thinking Cycle

Now what might happen is that another team forms and traverses the Production cycle. This team manages, designs and builds a marketable, scalable, refined product, the details of which are beyond this post’s scope. Our original team continues to traverse the Discovery cycle, seeking new product-market fits for the business. This original team will bring feasible-viable-desirable ideas to Production. This two-team adventure might look like this:

Here one balanced team begins to define a problem space while another team works on the live business offering. How do they work together? That’s a question for another day.

Cool Theory, But Does It Work In Practice?

Well, it’s mostly how I work now at Philosophie with my teammates. It’s always messier than this, because practice is messy. And sometimes, because we’re human, we lose sight of our ideals in tactical decisions and day-to-day interactions.

If I’ve misrepresented a concept, insulted your sensibilities, or you just think this is plain dumb, please let me know how and why.

If you work in a similar way or have thoughts about this sort of unification, I’d love to hear.