BUILDING MEASURABLE & ACTIONABLE DESIGN STRATEGY
Design Thinking, Agile and Lean — how they complement & work together
Design strategy lies at the point of intersection between UX design and business strategy. The fast-moving digital product landscape, rapid change in global socio-economic dynamics due to COVID pandemic brings a challenge to design and business leaders how they respond to the situation with creative, actionable, measurable & flexible design strategy.
In this article, we will look into the practical side of design strategy and how can take advantage of combining design thinking, agile & Lean methodologies to establish a successful, result oriented design strategy.
Some ways of innovating focus on building products and services that create customer values are design thinking, agile, lean. These management philosophies aim to take the risk out of the development and the process of delivery for avoiding the wastage of making products and services that customers do not require.
Before diving deep into the combing these three, let’s warm up with some basics, which I assume most of you may know, but it will help us to set the context and get into the flow.
WHAT IS DESIGN THINKING?
Design thinking is the most useful tool to tackle wicked or unknown problems. It is an arbitrary and repetitive process that is used by the teams for understanding users, redefining problems, challenging assumptions, and creating innovative solutions to prototype and test. Design thinking involves five phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.
· Stage 1: Empathize — Research & understand your users’ needs
· Stage 2: Define — State your users’ needs and problems
· Stage 3: Ideate — Challenge assumptions and generate ideas
· Stage 4: Prototype — Start to create solutions
· Stage 5: Test — Try your solutions out
Twenty first century organizations from different industries consider design thinking as a valuable way to solve problems for the users of their products or services. Design thinking is used to deal with unknown or wicked problems because they can analyze these in humanistic ways and focus on what is most important for users. Design thinking is considered as the best among the other designing processes because it provides best opportunity for “out of the box thinking”. Which helps the team to do better UX research, prototyping and usability testing to find out new ways to meet user’s requirement.
Design thinking is a valuable driving force in business (globally recognized big companies like Google, Apple, Airbnb have exerted its notable effects). Design thinking provides the freedom to generate ground breaking solutions which helps the team to get behind hard to access insights and administer a collection of hands-on methods to help find innovatory answers.
WHAT IS LEAN THINKING?
Lean thinking is the process of making business decisions in efficient and effective way. It is considered as the foundation of any lean practice. It is obvious that there is no single definition of lean. However, there are a few concepts as lean thinking can be divided into these five lean values that helps in lean thinking in today’s business. These principles are:
Lean Thinking helps organizations create and design efficient business flows that create products and services that customers need. More importantly, Lean Thinking transforms the mindset through which a business operates — one that is focused on continuous improvement and respect for people in order to churn out value. This mindset is what propels a Lean organization to work for lasting change. The kind of change that is for the betterment of the organization and its customers
WHAT IS AGILE THINKING?
Agile became known as a methodology for software development practices in the business world in 2001. The main aim was to upgrade management and create more dependable workplaces by using feedback and analysis. These were the factors that were used to produce and develop software to be used as tools. Later on, Agile expanded beyond software development.
Agile is now a worldwide embraced framework and a mind-set that allows businesses in almost every field for helping teams to adapt to changes and evolve within their industries. The Agile Mind-set, is more importantly a movement away from traditional, bureaucratic leadership (which involves mentalities like whoever is loudest is right or office politics). Instead of that the Agile Mind-set has put aside who and focus on what is right in the place of who is right.
Agile has evolved into more than just software related tasks and has branched out into an actual style of management.
· Innovation
· Emphasis on customer value
· Self- organized teams
· Networking and collaboration
Written in 2001, 17 software developers came together in Snowbird, Utah to propose a new way of developing software “by doing it and helping others do it.” This work made the signers of the Manifesto to understand the impact of these principles in the field of software development. But they had no clue that how quickly their ideas would be so successful and spread beyond their industry. Values the Manifesto creators cited as paramount were:
· Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
· Working software over comprehensive documentation
· Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
· Responding to change over following a plan
Ultimately, Agile is a mindset formed by the Agile Manifesto’s values and principles. Those values and principles provide guidance on how to create and respond to change and how to deal with unpredictability.
COMBINING DESIGN THINKING, LEAN AND AGILE
A design strategist may use multiple methods of Design Thinking, Lean and Agile to build design strategy. Making the strategy measurable, actionable, flexible and most importantly user centric should be the main goal of the design strategist.
For example, Design Thinking’s tools for identifying and understanding customer problems and providing insights into behaviour can be a very helpful input to the Agile development process, to ensure that the Agile team’s development is solving the right customer problem. Once a product or service is developed through the Agile process, it can be assessed and improved by using Lean to identify any waste in the current value stream that can be eliminated to improve the value to the customer. Lean methods of value-stream analysis can also be used as an input to the design thinking process in understanding current pain points in an existing service or product.
It is important to remember that Design Thinking, Lean, Agile mind-sets are not mutually exclusive. There are in fact a lot of overlap. This is very confusing because firstly we prefer simple explanations and secondly, we may tend to blend mind-sets into ways if working that make sense for the job at hand.
Writer Jonny Schneider, tries to put these three together for deriving an actionable strategy in famous book “Understanding Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile”.
The lean mind-set operates constant experimentation for learning the right way to correct answers. It assists in recognizing the correct things to build as well as upgrading the system of work that delivers value. This is totally agnostic to the medium in which value is created. The Design Thinking mind-set is all about understanding limitations, emphasize with the users, looking for opportunities and exploring possibilities to meet their needs. In short, it is a value creation process. The Agile is engrossed towards delivering outcome, incrementally to the users. It is how the upgrading team create value continuously, adapt to change requirements and build a software that is user centric.
It’s at the intersection of these three mindsets, depicted in the below figure, that we see how everything can fit together
5As DESIGN STRATEGY CHECKLIST
While these approaches look great on paper, but it need something tangible that can actually be used as a checklist while implementing your design strategy. It is needless to say that the degree in which you are going to combine these mindsets will vary depending on the complexity of your design project.
The below is my interpretation of Design Thinking, Lean and Agile put together to derive an actionable strategy checklist.
Here is the explanation of how 5A’s help you create the checklist for your design strategy. It is further distributed in to seven phases of any design project (Vision & Mission, Research, Ideate, Plant, Design, Test & Improve).
ASSESS: Start with assessing all the considerations that you need to include during different phases. It starts with understanding the Context, Market, Distinction and Audience for Vision & Mission and further moves through the different process. In this you are actually bringing everything to the table, that needs your focus.
ACT: Now, it’s time for action. You’ll bring the team and stakeholder’s together as per their requirement in different phases and start establishing the process through which you will ideate, plan, design, test, gather feedback and finally act on those feedbacks to improve the outcome of your design strategy.
For, e.g, in ‘Design’ phase, you will establish the process to create your design system, how the releases will happen, etc.
ATTEND: This is quite self-explanatory, as a design strategist you need the right people at the right time to ensure success. Therefore, you must have a clearly identified roles and responsibilities of participating teams and individuals, and most importantly your users.
ANALYZE: Here you will define metrics and measurement systems for success or CTQ (Critical To Quality) for each of these seven phases. The above checklist includes few of them but you can use variety of metrics, that represents your design strategy and it’s phases. Deep dive further into design thinking, agile and LEAN measurement process, and you will find the perfect metric for your design project. Just make sure, the process you define for each step during ‘ACT’ is able to capture the metrics you are going to monitor here.
ATTAIN: Finally, you need to very sure about the outcome you are expecting out of these seven phases. If you get the desired outcome, then probably you have done previous 4 steps correctly. If not, you may need to revisit your strategy.
Keep in mind that, these seven phases are iterative and continuously teach back to each other, you may not change your Vision & Mission frequently, but other six phases should always be connected and complement each other.
This ensures, that your design strategy, process and outcomes are continuously exploring, learning and improving, which is at the core of all the mindsets we talked about earlier.
CONCLUSION
Design thinking, LEAN and Agile are not new to us. It’s up to you as a design strategist or manager how effectively you put all these together, use available tools and resources you have, empower your teams, align yourself with organizational goals and deliver for your users.
Mostly, it’s the Lean mindset prompts our decisions as to what to do, when to do, and how to adapt our strategy execution. At the ever-adapting nature of Agile delivery plays a supporting role by being an enabler, not a constraint to change. Where Lean has scientific and critical thinking covered, Design Thinking provides the creativity needed when exploring new challenges, as the situation changes.
FURTHER READING & REFERENCES
“Understanding Design Thinking, Lean and Agile” by Jonny Schneider
Agile Manifesto
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/design-thinking
https://www.digi-corp.com/blog/understanding-how-design-thinking-lean-and-agile-work-together/
https://ideas.darden.virginia.edu/design-thinking-lean-agile
https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/building-and-managing-ux-team-ux-roles-and-its-process-c0938b217f44
https://www.lean.org/explore-lean/what-is-lean/
https://kanbanzone.com/resources/lean/
https://www.planview.com/resources/guide/lean-principles-101/lean-thinking-lean-practice/
