Design Thinking For Product Managers
Yes, that is correct. Design thinking workshop is not just for designers it’s for the whole team.Design thinking is not about being creative but how creatively we can solve a problem to drive a business metric. A Product Manager can create and validate value for the users. It is a 4 step, non linear process to drive user centric product development. With lean and agile methodologies, teams can deliver features but with design thinking you can deliver real value for user vs only delivering features.
I have a simple 4 step process for product manager to create user value and establish shred understanding within team. I have arrived at this process based on my own experience working and numerous material I read on the topic.
1. Context — The very first step of deign thinking workshop is to set business goal on we are trying to improve, what problems we need to solve and who are we solving it for.These three answers are most important to build successful products that add real value to users. Stakeholders can come together and discuss the problems they have prior to the design thinking workshop. A lot of times we have list of problems to solve for, and these workshops are used to clarify these problems and prioritize them. After the problems have been identified, the team should now focus on the target user. whether teams should identify the problem first or Users first is a situation based question. If the team is working on the MVP then identifying problems to solve for is a priority. If your product is already out and being used, then identifying a user base and solving for them makes more sense. Either ways, it is not wrong. E.g. Alexa team can have a workshop to increase it’s User base in corporate setup. In this case, the first question the team needs to answer is who is their ideal professional user. In other case, the team can find answers on how to improve the Alexa’s response latency. In second case the teams have to first understand the context of the problem.
2. Solution — For the problems identified, conduct a detailed competitive market analysis and user research to understand what solution already exists and what users unmet need we can prioritize. Create a solution metric to prioritize. This metric will change depending on what phase the product is in and what goal we are trying to accomplish. A basic metric could be as impact vs effort. All the solutions can be evaluated and decided upon to work with. When you do a competitive analysis, focus on what solutions as well as substitutes the users already have. Identify what value proposition you want to get with your product in this competitive landscape. See how relevant this value is to your target users. You can conduct some interviews or surveys to understand the user impact with the value identified and solution proposed.
3. Test — It is important to validate your understanding of the problem, value identified and chosen target persona. the aim to validate as much with as little investment as possible. Define a long term and short term goal for the product and define success metric that will help you validate the all the above. One of the ways to achieve this is to create prototypes, re-visiting target users with the prototypes and capture feedback on it. It is a new product, test with a high fidelity prototype and if its a new feature, test it with AB testing or prototypes. Get these assumptions validated before they get in the sprint.
4. Feedback & Repeat — The beauty of agile is you can iterate. Start with a basic prototype, test it with users and gather feedback to make changes. Also, don’t get stuck in rinse and repeat loop. you don’t want to miss out on any advantage by reaching late to your users. plus, you don’t have to get everything right in the validation phase. This is why you to set up a short time goal _ metric and long term goal+ metric.
In the end, no one can predict the future. Product Managers can look in the crystal ball and define the fate of a new feature or assure the success of a product in a particular market. But they can certainly try to gauge what could work and validate often to mitigate the ambiguity. Design thinking i certainly a step to deliver user value, be innovative and solve complex problems step by step.
Some good reads on design thinking -
https://openclassrooms.com/en/courses/4555886-host-a-design-thinking-workshop
