From Empathy to Transformation: The Disruptor’s Design Thinking Primer for Better Market Fit

The content below was referenced in the Disruptor’s podcast “Building Trust and Surviving Digital Disruption” w/ Nicholas Jayanty and Jan Almasy.

Why use Design Thinking?

“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe” — Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.

My backstory: In 2015, I was part of a due diligence team evaluating a potential acquisition of a startup SaaS company based in Austin, Texas. The startup had a unique, disruptive, innovative approach to planning, consuming, and managing cloud services.

My firm acquired the company in November of 2015, and we spent much of 2016 trying to sell our shiny new toy.

We felt we had the opportunity to disrupt the way organizations approached their end-to-end IT supply chain, and we did. Unfortunately, our customers and, to some degree, our sales teams did not know why they needed it.

We were selling the what.

At first, our prospects liked what we were selling, we booked lots of first meetings and a good number of follow-on meetings, but we could not close the deals. Our product was perceived as complex, expensive, and had a long time to value. We were selling wedding cakes, and our customers wanted to buy cupcakes.

Design thinking uses a technique called the cake evolution roadmap to describe the size and complexity of a product or service. The concept is simple; three types of cakes are used in design thinking.

The Cake Evolution RoadMap

Our deals stalled. We needed to pivot our sales strategy. After a two-day meeting in Austin, Texas, with a distinguished engineer, a product manager, an architect, and a couple of seasoned sales consultants, we came up with the crazy idea of applying design thinking to the sales process, and over the last few years proceeded to run over 30 Design Thinking Workshops globally, with organizations located in Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia, Latin America, and North America.

So here is what we have learned …

Our research and experience show that organizations that attempt a “waterfall approach” to deploying transformational initiatives have close to a 100% failure rate. In today’s fast-paced, rapidly changing, disruptive cloud world, the need to be agile is more relevant than ever.

In today’s fast-paced, rapidly changing, disruptive world, the need to be agile is more relevant than ever. Using the concept of the cake evolution roadmap, you can provide an agile experience quickly, as depicted above, starting with a skateboard, as the cupcake provides a transportation experience without having to wait for the car.

Based on this experience, we developed 5 step design thinking-based process to help organizations, startups, entrepreneurs, and not-for-profit organizations, develop a strategy for better market fit. We created a set of design thinking templates and artifacts to collaboratively create a set of customized and prioritized “User Stories” or MVPs that mapped to an agile-based deployment road map.

One of the key objectives is to use design thinking to identify the “skateboard and the scooter” and not fall into the trap of trying to build the “car” from the get-go.

Reframing an organization’s situation or perceived needs and problems through the lens of user needs reveals the challenges and opportunities involved in delivering value to your stakeholders.

You now have something that your customers actually need and want to buy.

Design Thinking uses the ”Double Diamond” approach, which emphasizes “divergent” and “convergent” thinking, where first, many ideas are created before refining and narrowing down to the best ideas.

Iteration and aggregation create a linked scenario illustrating the overall strategic approach.

Want to know more? Read The Disruptor’s Design Thinking Primer for a curated set of industry resources to get you started on your design thinking journey. https://medium.com/@The_Disruptor_Podcast/the-disruptors-design-thinking-primer-b3fa11de059

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