Pillar 4: Establish a design-thinking mindset
Design thinking is a framework for identifying opportunities, exploring solutions, and testing them.
The benefit of a well-formed, effective design team is in how it transforms the whole organization, empowering everyone to think more critically and creatively in identifying problems, figuring out what to tackle, and the solutions they work towards.
This is design thinking, and while it has “design” in the name, it’s not just for designers. It offers a repeatable method for identifying opportunities, develop new solutions, and to validate those ideas, all relatively quickly. When this methodology is adopted by a whole squad, it superpowers their alignment and cooperation, and helps them work more effectively, autonomously.
Design thinking was popularized by the design agency, IDEO:
“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”
Its approach has been adapted into the Design Sprint, outlined in the book Sprint by Jake Knapp of Google Ventures. This is the way a lot of organizations first interact with the methodology.
I’ve taught design thinking at several organizations now, and it is often quite transformative. I’ve led design sprints at multiple organizations. At Liberty Mutual we were committed as a company to instilling this approach within our product org and developed a program that immersed whole squads in a month-long effort, called Digital Garages that taught the participants the methods and principles, and had them working on a core product problem, interviewing users, and building & testing prototypes.
Scenes from a digital garage
A number of things happen. First, team cohesion grows. Designers, engineers, PMs are working together and building bonds. And since no one is stuck exclusively in their domain expertise (designers in Figma, engineers coding, PMs in JIRA… sorry), everyone is working together and equally contributing.
Design sprint cadence
This also gives the larger team a greater appreciation of the skills and approach designers bring to the work. They start to realize that design isn’t “make it look pretty” but rather, a user-centered approach to solving business problems. After I’ve taught teams about design thinking, I see the efforts of designers to be more valued.
One last key benefit of design thinking is that it sets the team up for success going forward. I’ve facilitated a number of design sprints over the years. And while we make meaningful progress on whatever challenge we focused on for the sprint, the team learns this framework and leverages those skills and exercises in their work going forward. Where a team might get stuck on “what to tackle next?” before they were introduced to design thinking, the team will set up an effective brainstorming session* to focus on a real user need.
* unstructured brainstorming sessions are mostly useless and essentially action that isn’t actually productive. A design thinking ideation session is very different.
Teams have the tools to better define the problems and challenges before them, to break them down into key parts, and tackle them effectively, all without wasting time debating about what to do or how to do it.
In conclusion
I’ve found that investing in these four areas will turn a collection of well intentioned designers into an effective team that can transform a product org and help power innovation throughout the company. It’s simple enough, to outline, but takes a lot of hard work from everyone involved to achieve. And it does take time. But once you make headway on these pillars, the transformation begins to accelerate.
What do you think? Have you seen other foundational pillars for building a team that I didn’t address? Or do you have questions about the how to structure this? I’d love to hear from you.