Why is going through design thinking process an important step within our business process and daily entrepreneurial activities?

Design thinking is a process of framing problems and finding solutions. It is a discipline that uses the Designer’s desirability and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.

By using design thinking principles, entrepreneurs are able to empathize with their customers on a continual basis to design and develop products and services that solves their pain points as well as helping them do their jobs more effectively.

Throughout the design thinking process, an entrepreneur is able to have a deep understanding about their potential and current customers and realize how they actually behave which presents the entrepreneur a precious opportunity.

But how we can start?

First – We need to reframe questions that we usually ask to within the team and challenge status quo. There is need for a fresh our mindset in the way in which you have currently been executing business activities. When looking at your customer or potential user, some questions to ask are: What is the nature of the problem? Which problem can we impact the most? What can we do for them?

Second – Have a diverse team for this exercise. Team diversity and focus on people are the main key words along the five steps of our design thinking process: DISCOVER new insights that matter, DEFINE our business value, IDEATE ways for moving toward the whitespaces, PROTOTYPE our ideas and TEST it though superior users’ engagements.

Third  –  We need to experiment, fail and do it again. You need to view failure as a “necessary part of human-centered design that allows you to listen, test, learn, and refine. It fuels iteration so you can validate your ideas along the way and ultimately make something better for your customers.”

Now, Design Thinking principles is ready to be applied in our daily business activities. We are ready for matching what we offer with what our customers or users desire, and creating a product market fit.

The point of view from which we are looking problems and making solutions changes. Many organizations innovate from the “inside out”, but now we are able to think more “outside in” i.e. what do customers really want that we may not have thought of ourselves?

The secret is in a simple exercise: asking yourself, the team and the clients “why” in 5 different levels, until we get the answer that we are looking for.

In the next article, we shall look at look at part 2 of the Design thinking.