The open secret of design thinking is to start with a problem and develop multiple solutions in order to come up with the best solution. Starting with a solution in mind reduces the chance of picking the right tool.
You want to find the best solution to improve your customers’ experience, so where do you start? Instinct can lead us down a path to explore tooling and solutions or go to market leaders for their opinion – and many organisations go down this path. If this behaviour of jumping to the answer and rapid solutionising sounds familiar, you might miss an opportunity to solve the real problem and exceed customer expectations.
Through multiple product, service and digital transformations, we found that the best solution to improve your customers’ experience is the solution that solves under-served and latent customer needs while solving a problem and delivering prioritised outcomes to the business. As such, the best place to start is by empathising and understanding your customers through applying design thinking.
Why is now a critical time to apply design thinking? The technology landscape is rapidly changing and a solution that would have been right last year may no longer be the best. The advances in technology and different solutions open up new means to solve customers’ problems, and companies who don’t keep an open mind about tooling are at risk of being taken over by more dynamic competitors.
More importantly, though, customer demand and behaviours are changing rapidly too. Their needs and expectations are constantly changing so if you want to select the best solutions, you need to stay ahead of your evolving customer needs.
So where to start? If you have a well-defined vision and strategy, which breaks down into Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) you have effectively set out the objective, scope and guardrails of the solution. Before you pick a solution though, you need to ensure you are solving the right problem; best phrased as a ‘How might we’ problem statement and using design thinking.
We have explored design thinking and the core concept of a double diamond in a previous blog. In essence, it separates the problem and solution space into two diamonds which start with exploring options and defining a path forward.