The Great Treasure of Design Thinking

Week of 10/5 - 10/12

It seems like a very short time from when I first pitched my idea for a startup to finishing my business plan to present at my final pitch. In about 4 weeks from now, our final pitch day will arrive and my team and I have been working around the clock in "finalizing" our business plan and having all the customer data ready to present in the proper fashion. We have made many changes to our business plan as the weeks have gone by and with all the customer data we received from our survey, it has led us to iterate our Customer relationships and unique value proposition in our business plan.

Aside from getting ready for the final pitch, I mentioned in my last blog that I was going to make it my goal to complete a small Design Thinking course offered by Stanford University. As I went through the course, there were many things that I took away not only from the thinking process itself but, also the business aspects of this idea. The course taught me the several problems that occur in a business that pulls it apart and leads to its failure such as how the different branches of a company are so divided amongst each other causing a social connection problem in a startup. For example, the engineering team only sits with the engineers and the finance team only sits with finance but, both of these teams never sit together, reducing the social interaction between different groups in the workplace. Something else that I also learned about the design thinking process is the politics of the workplace. Politics is one of the several factors that can determine where you stand in a company and sometimes can break a company apart. for the sake of this blog, I won't go into too much detail discussing this topic as this topic itself has a lot to discuss.

What I noticed about the Design Thinking Process is that it draws similarities to the Lean Startup model. Both talk about ideating, experimenting, and prototyping in the most efficient ways possible. Being familiar with the Lean Startup model in the past helped me better understand this concept of design thinking and helped me come up with ways I could implement design thinking into my startup using the five stages of design thinking which are 1.Empathize, 2.Define, 3.Ideate, 4.Prototype, and 5.Test.