Design Thinking and Startups
Design Thinking and Startups: How Design Thinking Can Help Entrepreneurs Take a New Approach to their Business
What is Design Thinking?
It is a concept that people adopt to solve complex problems. Basically it is a human-centered approach to harness the power of creativity to develop innovative solutions in all aspects of life. If you are serious about innovating your business, you need to use design thinking in your critical business and product decisions. Despite its name, design thinking isn’t just for designers. Design thinking is for anyone who is serious about solving problems. Design thinking looks at a problem from different perspectives. The goal is always to create something useful and elegant for the end-user.
Design Thinking Defined
The most important thing to know about design thinking is that it requires a lot of thoughtful people doing a lot of different things. Startups don’t often have time for that kind of deliberation. Every person in your company should be able to contribute something of value. You’re also going to need to involve many customers in the design process. The key to successful implementation is to hire creative people to find the most creative solution to the problem. Without creative people, design thinking won’t work. If your company already has talented designers, you’re already off to a good start. If you’re not sure about hiring designers, go to HubSpot’s blog where they list 100 of their favorite designers. Each designer is someone who creates something amazing every single day.
How Design Thinking Helps Entrepreneurs
Design thinking helps entrepreneurs focus on what customers want, instead of just building what they think is right. Innovation starts with a solid business strategy that takes into account the changes customers will bring to your business. People will naturally gravitate to innovations that improve their lives. By aligning your business strategy with customers’ needs, you can create more successful products. The trick is to take people on a journey that lets them discover what they want. This might be as simple as listening to what they’re saying about your product. Customers need to see how you’re going to meet their needs, and if they feel like they’re part of the process. The Need to Make Things Easier for Customers Businesses always have to make things easier for customers.
Entrepreneurs Can Use Design Thinking
Whether you’re selling a product, service, or a piece of technology, design thinking is still a great approach to customer and user experience design. As the leader of a startup, you need to solve problems that most companies don’t need to deal with, because you’re not the target demographic. But you still need to be careful when using design thinking.
Design Thinking in Practice: Don’t Be Scared of Design Thinking, Do Be Curious
When you do it right, design thinking can change your business forever. What will you do when design thinking hits a stumbling block? How will you solve it? Design thinking provides the basis for a different and better approach to running a startup. Here are a few suggestions on how you can use design thinking to improve your business.
Structure Your Entire Strategy
Since design thinking is a process, you should always be working toward a solution. You should be creating thought experiments. Use design thinking to explore all possible scenarios that can arise from different possible actions that you can take. Strategic planning should begin with a big picture view of your business and market, not an analysis of a particular set of data or point in time. “There should be something to learn from everything that happens in a product or process that you’re working on,” says Johnson.
Conclusion
The more you know about design thinking, the better you will be equipped to build better products that achieve higher engagement from their users.