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I'm sure you must be familiar with Apple Inc.
Apple is well known among billions worldwide for its superior products
and their experience. The qualities embodied by Apple products all comes down to the visionary tenets of product
development set by the company's legendary founder, Steve Jobs.
At the time of its inception, Apple's business problem was to make computing easy for people. Apple reinvented the
business problem by undertaking methods to create quality products by combining good design with usability. Two
things that people generally look for in a product. In modern product management, one of the ways this could be
achieved is by using the framework called design thinking. In this session, you will be introduced to this concept of
design thinking and understand the what, the why and the how of design thinking.
The session will focus on three important concepts to begin with, which are product thinking, innovation and design
thinking. These three concepts form the foundation on which design thinking works. You will understand how a
product goes through the iterative cycle of development through the five stages of design thinking.
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This process enables you to create a well-defined product by identifying customer problems, defining the
problem-solving capabilities of the product, ideating on proper solutions, and finally, creating and testing prototypes
to gain user feedback and to further improve the product. Throughout this session, you will understand how design
thinking is put to use in real life through the examples of brands, adopting design thinking, anecdotal mentions from
my personal experience, and finally, through a case study.
Your product works in two spaces. First, is the customer, which is the problem space. Customers face certain
problems that need to be solved. The second is your business, which is the solution space. Your business understands
the customer's problems and tries to identify effective solutions to these problems.

Your product acts as a bridge between the customer's needs and your business goals. The mindset behind the
journey that ties the problem space that is your customers, to the solution space, that is your businesses, is termed
as product thinking. Without product thinking, it can be easy to get lost in the process of creating good designs and
experiences and forgetting the core reason why customers use your products in the first place.
Product thinking helps you see the product as a whole, rather than focusing on a feature of the product. There are
three basic steps to ensure that you are thinking in terms of prioritising your product over the features. Let's
understand these steps through an example. Let's take BigBasket. Today, BigBasket has become a household name
through its game changing work in the online grocery shopping industry. Let's understand how the tenets of product
thinking helps BigBasket in solving the user's problems.
The first step is to begin with your users and determine what is the problem that needs to be solved. For BigBasket, it
was to make the experience of online grocery shopping simple and self-explanatory. The audience the company was
targeting included the urban working people who found it difficult to make time to go out to buy groceries. So, they
wanted a quick and convenient process of grocery shopping.
The next step in product thinking is to uncover the jobs to be done, the jobs that your product is hired to do. You
need to know why you are building the product and why customers are willing to buy it? Why are you doing this?
That is the vision. In case of BigBasket, it is to reduce the drudgery of grocery shopping and introduce an easy relaxed

process of buying groceries online. How are you going to do this? That is what is your strategy? BigBasket strategy
was to analyse your shopping history. People generally buy similar groceries over and over again. So, the company
wanted to understand how it could use this data to provide an easy process.
The last step is to identify your desired outcome. What will your product help your customers achieve? What are
your product goals? In BigBasket’s case, it would help the customers buy groceries faster, and lastly, what are you
going to do to meet these goals? What are your features for big basket? Big basket landed on the idea of smart
basket, a feature that looks at your shopping history and provides a recommendation list. Through this feature, users
can quickly add recommended items to their cart in just one click.
As BigBasket exemplified product thinking helps you focus on the customer's need, while keeping the product
strategy in mind and not getting lost in the tactical of the features of the products.
As product managers, our main job is to find solutions to customer problems. We want to find solution that are novel
and delight our customers, but how can you come up with such solutions? Well, this is where innovation comes into
the picture. Before we understand how to innovate, let's understand what is innovation? You might have heard the
phrase; innovation is in the eyes of the beholder. What does that mean?

Innovation is often considered to be a path, breaking idea, something that didn't exist before. It is expected to be a
big idea that just happened. It is considered to be powered by sudden inspiration.
Think of Archimedes, when he had his eureka movement or when Apple fell on Newton, but that is not what
innovation is all about. Is it? Innovation is progress. Any idea that helps your users make progress towards the goal is
innovation. Let's understand this through a simple example.
Let's say we have a user named John. Any user including John is defined by the circumstances and choices, who they
are, where they are located, what they do and what are the likes and dislikes? These choices and circumstances keep
changing. Therefore, any innovative solution that cater to these choices also need to evolve with these changing
choices.

Now, john is standing on one side of the lake and has a particular need or a goal that is, he wants to cross the lake.
For this, he needs to identify different ways to cross the lake. He can choose to cross the lake by swimming across it,
using a boat, a crossing rope or even a jet pack, all of these ways are innovative, as they help John progress towards
the goal of crossing the lake, but only inventing such an idea is not innovation. It's equally important that your users
are ready to adopt your ideas to reach their goals. The idea that John will adopt best is the idea that will become
more successful. Hence, innovation is invention plus adoption.
Innovation is not one great idea, but a way to help your users progress towards their goals. But how do you get
innovative? How does innovation drive you to build better products for your customers? What if I say there is a
step-by-step guide to it? Well, let me introduce to you design thinking. The term design thinking was made famous by
Tim Brown, chairman of IDEO, which is one of the world's leading industrial design firms.

He states that design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to
integrate the needs of the people, the possibilities of the technology and the requirements of business success. In
simple terms, design thinking is a structured process of coming up with successful Innovations. It is an iterative
process to understand the user's challenges and assumptions and redefine the problems in a human-centric manner.
Instead of thinking how do I make the cars faster? You need to think how do I help my users reach their destinations
faster. Faster car is not the need, faster modes of travel is. This fundamentally changes how you think about your
solutions, because, ultimately you want to help your users.
Design thinking, helps to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be initially apparent to us. There
are many variants of design thinking process that are in use today, but they are all based on the same principles.
Every organisation, teams, product leaders adopt the variance of design thinking that suits them the best, however,
to get started, we will focus on the five-phase model proposed by Larry Leifer, the founding director at Stanford
Centre of Design Research.

He states design thinking to be a five-stage process that includes the following steps: Empathise: Empathise with your
users, understand their problems and goals from their perspective. Next is define, define your users’ needs and their
problems using your insights. Ideate: Ideate by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions.
Next is prototype. Prototype to start creating solutions, and, lastly, is test. Test your solutions to gain customer
feedback and use it to further improve your products.
Design thinking involves having a childlike curiosity. Do you remember how you, when you were a little kid, you
looked at everything objectively with the intention to learn about it without any bias. This is exactly what design
thinking is. You need to learn from your users and not let your preconceived thoughts come in your way.
Most of the time, users may say one thing and mean something else. Here's a famous quote by Henry Ford. If I had
asked public what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. As a design thinker, it's your job to understand
the core of your users’ needs even when they don't know it themselves. So, how do you understand the core of your
users’ needs? Well, you can do this by identifying their personal needs and wants, or in other words, you can be
empathetic to your users.

The key to developing empathy is to understand their given problems from the user's perspective and not get
affected by your preconceived biases. How do we do this? Well, there are a number of techniques that aid the
emphasising with your users. Let's take a look at two of the most prominent ones.
Let's first talk about observations. In this technique, you need to act like a fly on the wall. That is, you need to
observe, but not interact with your users yet. You observe them from a distance and understand how they go about
their work and notice their actions, expressions, emotions, most importantly, you identify any workarounds that
people use to chip away their problems.
Another technique in developing empathy is interviewing your users. In this technique, you interact with your users
and ask some probing questions. The first step towards having a successful interview is to decide whom to interview.
This is a very important step. You need to select the users who fit your target group. Think about varied age groups,
sex, occupation, geography as relevant parameters. You would want to interview all the stakeholders in the workflow.
Let's take an example. If you want to design a new online fee payment mechanism for colleges, apart from the
colleges, you need to interview students, their parents, as well as various financial institutes to fully understand the
challenges that exist in the payment mechanism today. Here is a pro tip for you, when you're working in this stage,
try to follow observations with interviews. Any open-ended questions that you have as part of your observations, can
be clarified during the interviews.

Mindbody, the organisation I work for operates in the wellness space, helping fitness and spa and salon businesses
manage and grow their business. We use design thinking at the core of any problem-solving exercise. During the
global COVID-19 health crisis, the fitness industry saw a tremendous change.
Many studios had to close their doors overnight and had to start conducting online sessions. Studio owners
immediately scrambled for available tools to start conducting classes online, but they noticed that the number of
people buying long-term memberships had dropped drastically. This, in turn affected mind body's revenue as well.
We spent a lot of time interviewing customers on various concerns to understand the problems from the user's
perspective. Apart from the owners and staff that are actually conducting the classes, we also talked to consumers
who are taking those classes.
We had questions around how fitness studio owners were conducting classes, whether consumers liked these classes
and how consumers were looking to suffice their fitness needs. Generally, we would visit studios to conduct
observations. However, as in-person observations were not possible, considering the restrictions that came with the
pandemic, we analyse user behaviour with the data that we could find.

Always remember, at the empathy stage, you need to have a clear and granular idea of what customers seek to
remedy for, what goals they set for themselves and how your product can help in this journey.
After collecting the required data from your interviews and observations, it is time to accumulate all the data and
analyse it. Try to find common themes and patterns that emerge from this data. The simplest way to do it is to put all
the data points on sticky notes and try to find common patterns around your users and their needs. As we did, this
mapping exercises mind body, we obtain crucial information about our customers and consumers. We came up with
the following learnings.

For our consumers, our users, the consumers, who were bargain seekers and needed affordable classes. Their need
was to continue exercising at their preferred time, and the insight we gained was that consumers needed variety and
flexibility in their training regime to stay engaged with their fitness schedule. For customers, these were business
owners struggling to keep their businesses afloat during the pandemic. Their need was to earn more money and get
recurring paying customers.
The insights we obtained was that these business owners were ready to try and experiment with new ways and new
business models to get new customers. After gathering the required insights, the next step is to define your problem
statement. It is a powerful way to turn your insights into opportunities. One of the commonly used frameworks to
define these problems is the use of how might we statement?
This is the format we used for these statements. How might we offer the intended experience for a primary user so
that the desired effect can be achieved. Here, the intended experience is the problem you have identified or the
need your customer has. The primary user is the user segment that you are solving this problem for. The desired
effect is the benefit that the user segment gains from using the solution to the problem. It reflects the insights that
you have gained from your empathy exercises.
For example, how might we redesign the checkout process for customers so that it can be simple and intuitive? A
good how might we statement is generative. This suggests that a solution is possible by using this statement, and

these statements offer you a chance to find such solutions in a variety of ways. Let's take an example: How might we
help people eat nutritional food? In this case, people represent a very broad user segment. You might want to focus
on a certain age group or a certain region to make it more granular.
Let's say you want to focus on children, age 5 to 10 in Africa. So, the ideas you would think to solve the nutritional
food challenge would be totally different than say teenagers in United States of America.
A good statement in this case will be how might we help kids between the age group of 5 to 10 in Africa, get access
to nutritional food? Let's consider another example: how might we help domestic workers in India find work online?
Can you guess what is wrong here? This statement is very narrow. You already have a solution embedded into it, that
is finding work online. We want to write a problem statement that leaves room to explore solutions. A better
statement would be. How might we help domestic workers in India find work easily? This gives us room to explore
various solutions that can be used in this context.
At Mindbody, we defined two problem statements based on the user insights we had collected. The first was: how
might we help fitness enthusiasts, get a variety of fitness classes online so that they can access, affordable fitness and
the second one was: how might we help fitness studios reach new subscribers so that they can increase their
revenue? Your how might we statements should neither be too broad nor too narrow. Broad statements are vague

and can confuse your team to identify more than what needs to be solved, most of which would be unnecessary. On
the other hand, narrow statements can be very restrictive and leave no room for creative problem solving.
Once you have defined the problem statement, the next step, as you might have guessed, is to find ways to solve this
particular problem. During the process of design thinking, you tend to diverge and converge your ideas at various
stages. Diverging refers to creating new choices or coming up with multiple choices. Converging refers to deciding
options to go forward with. In the ideation phase, we generate a lot of ideas to solve the problem at hand, and hence
we call it diverge. By the end of this stage, you will again converge by selecting the idea that you want to prototype
and test.
The key to understanding ideation is to assume that there are no right ideas, but we want to find the most number of
probable solutions that will help your users to solve the problem. This is where the practice of brainstorming helps us
out. Brainstorming is one of the most commonly used technique to come up with a lot of ideas in a short span of
time. You need to brainstorm with a diverse set of people. They could be from your own team or other stakeholders
as well, but they should not be your end users.

As you brainstorm, keep these points in mind. Defer judgment on the ideas that your team comes up with. It is
important to provide a safe space for the participants to think openly and come up with new ideas. Don't judge the
ideas on the feasibility or relevance at this stage. Go for quantity of ideas, rather than the quality of them, more the
ideas, the better. Encourage wild ideas. It's often said that it's easier to tame down a wild idea than to spruce up a
plain one.
Build on each other's ideas. Collaboration and teamwork are very, very important. Stick to one conversation at a
time, avoid any crosstalk and distractions, use visuals images and rough drawings, or sketches to quickly articulate
your idea. Another very useful tool could be taking notes to gather everyone's feedback and keeping it in a single
cohesive place. Use headlines that describe your ideas quickly, save the details for later. The best way to conduct an
ideation session is to pick a facilitator for this activity.
A facilitator is a person who has deep understanding of the user and their problems. This can be you as the product
manager or your user experience counterpart. The facilitator drives the session and keeps the momentum going. He
or she ensures that everyone is able to share the ideas and the decorum of the activity is maintained. Another
interesting task for you as the product manager or a UX representative leading the brainstorming, is to come up with
multiple many how might we statements. This can help you steer the brainstorming activity in the desired direction.

For the problem we had in Mindbody, we came up with multiple how might we statements. Let's start by looking at
the main problem we started with? How might we help fitness enthusiasts, get a variety of fitness classes online so
that they can get access to affordable fitness? What are some of the mini how might we statements for this one? For
the ideation, we came up with these mini how might we statements?
How might we help fitness enthusiasts access a variety of online fitness classes? How might we help fitness
enthusiasts get access to affordable classes? How might we help fitness enthusiasts, try new classes before buying a
membership? The second main problem statement that we had was: how might we help fitness studios reach new
subscribers so that they can increase their revenue, and here are the mini how might we statements, we came up for
this problem statement.

How might we help fitness businesses gain new subscribers? How might we help fitness businesses earn more
money? How might we help fitness businesses conduct better life classes that would in turn, get them more
customers? All these statements helped us generate a lot of ideas. We spent five to seven minutes generating ideas
of each of these how might we statements.
For example, for the statement, how might we help fitness businesses earn more money? We came up with ideas
around new ways to generate income, such as providing recording studios to record more engaging content, renting
out fitness gear to these businesses to expand the workouts that the consumers can perform. Similarly, we iterate on
ways to allow consumers to attend different classes across various businesses and try new workouts every day.
After a successful brainstorming session, we collected over 20 to 30 ideas. The team then watered by placing markers
on most promising ideas. You should pick the team's top three to four ideas to take into the next phase. That is
prototyping. The idea that aligned well with mind body's core strategy was to provide a workout pass that would
allow consumers to take classes from various studios and also let the studios benefit from it by engaging with new
consumers. This idea helped us align the problem both from the consumer and the businesses. Hence, we selected
the idea to take into prototyping stage.

Design thinking is an intriguing subject, one that has a very close relationship to the success or failure of a new
product or new service. Design thinking is meant to tackle two important aspects. One is solving a specific problem
or a set of problems, and the other is achieving desirability from the customers’ consumers’ perspective. Design
thinking is practical and creative. It's a methodology that can solve complex problems and find desirable solutions. In
order to apply design thinking, one should follow a sort of five steps process.
The first stage is, empathise. A big part of design thinking concept involves empathy. It helps you understand people
you are designing for and is done through a series of activities. Let's look at the example of Gillette, how they
followed the design thinking process and launched Gillette guard, a shaving blade in 2010 that solved Indian
consumers’ problems. Before launching the product, Gillette did an 18 months intensive study, market research and
observation happened in India, where Gillette brought 20 people, ranging from engineers to developers from the US
headquarters.
They spent 3000 hours with more than 1000 consumers at their homes, stores. They witness that men in rural parts
of India shave without electricity, water or mirror and realise the best way to reveal insights and opportunities, is to
go out into the real world and see how people behave in their own environment in the context of that problem,
which in this case was shaving.

They observed the shaving routine throughout the day, among other routines of the intended consumers, and
sometimes, they stayed late understood their potential consumers asked them what their aspirations were, why they
wanted to shave and how often they shaved and so on. Gillette, therefore, through this process, empathised with
their consumers and completed the first stage of design thinking.
The second stage of design thinking is, define. Here you come up with your problem statement based on what you
have learned about your users and about their context. The define mode is critical to the design process because it
helps narrow down to the right problem that you want to solve, and then it allows you to frame the problem in a way
that invites creative solutions, creative ideas. Continuing our example of Gillette shaving blade, the team from their
previous stage learned that families often live in huts without electricity and several families share a bathroom, and
therefore, one would regularly see men shaving sitting on the floor with a bowl of water and often without a mirror,
and they do it in the dark morning hours.
As a result, they take even up to half an hour comparable to the 5-7 minutes that it should ideally take. Thus, Indian
men, they strain not to cut themselves because they are doing it in the dark without a mirror. From this data
collection, the team defined their problem statement, which was to create an effective and affordable razor, which
was safe.
Next two stages are to ideate and prototype. Ideate is the mode of the design process in which you concentrate on
idea generation. Ideation provides both the fuel, as well as the source material for building prototypes and getting
innovative solutions into the hands of your users.

Gillette realised that, apart from affordability, customers also valued safety and use of use. Customers lacked running
water. They had to often manage longer facial hair. They sat on the floor while shaving existing double razor solutions
caused frequent cuts. In response to these insights, Gillette then designed a razor which had a better grip, making
the experience easier and safer. Designing a safety comb tackles the problem of frequent cuts, especially for men
who are not daily shavers, and therefore, the razor had to deal with longer hair. The hang hole was introduced as a
response to less convenient conditions and to allow for easy drying and storage.
Next phase is to design the prototype. In this stage, you transform your preliminary defined ideas into a physical form
so that your customers can interact with them, and in the process, you can learn and develop more empathy and
better solutions. This stage helps you understand how your final product will interface with the user.
The last phase is to test the prototype that we solve the define problem statement. The test mode is when you solicit
feedback about the prototypes you have created from your users. Test is basically done to refine prototypes and
solutions. In Gillette example of design thinking, Gillette then went back to customers who they interviewed during
the empathy stage to test their newly developed product, and they noted that the users really liked the product and
hence they were confident and launched their successful product in the Indian market under the brand Gillette guard
in 2010.

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