Design Thinking a Better Milkshake
Colorful post-it notes, sharpie markers, kindergarten stick figure drawings everywhere. Your first thought as you walk into a design thinking workshop might be, “have I accidentally stumbled into a preschool Montessori classroom?” Mine was. There is a method to the madness. Are you keen to think, collaborate and problem solve more creatively? Design thinking is a powerful toolkit help you.
Design thinking generally refers to either a human first way of viewing the world or the collaboration, experimentation, and creativity toolkit based on said point of view. The goal of this article is to describe the design thinking point of view and explore the toolkit. We will walk through a tangible example. We are going to use a tasty milkshake business to learn more. This article builds a deeper than buzzword level awareness of design thinking and demonstrates how design thinking spurs creative problem solving.
Part I. Where is Your Focus?
Relentless product focus drives much progress. Organizations build up skills and competencies around a specific product. Companies push these products from early adopters to later market segments. The product focused firm orients its resources towards improving the product. The product is everything.
Product centered thinking permeates business, here is one example:
The technology adoption curve, which Geoffrey Moore articulates in Crossing the Chasm, presupposes the existence of market segments filled with customers needing the product. Customers merely do not know they need the product yet. According to Moore, the marketer should focus on one group of customers at a time, using each group as a base for marketing to the next group. The firm guides customers to the wonderful product. As you can see, the product is the primary focus.
Here is another common framework which sidelines the customer. This framework is the SWOT analysis. Take a look.
Companies often analyze new strategies, projects, or products across these two dimensions. But where is the customer?
A product first focus risks missing the underlying needs of the customer. A company focused on the “best product” must eventually ask “best” in the eyes of whom? A further complication; the customer definition of best is rarely stable. Customer needs constantly evolve in different directions. Best in class products often fall unhappily out of fashion or are thrown into the dustbin of obsolescence.
“Customers” are never a neatly definable set of requirements. Any customer categorization or segmentation relies on countless assumptions, abstractions and extrapolations. These customer assumptions risk becoming dogma. Many companies can unlock hidden value and discover new markets by upending their product focus and re-prioritizing the customer.
Here is an example. YETI coolers sell for about 10x the price of the humble but trusted Coleman. I doubt a serious argument can be made that YETI performs objectively better at the task of keeping beer cold, but YETI created a whole new market. YETI fanboys please do correct me below. I suspect someone at YETI decided to look at what the customer needed. They found the customer needs more than just cold beer. It is left to the reader to work out what customer need YETI targets. YETI broke through the dogma and built a company.
The design thinking toolkit helps teams grapple with these dynamics. Design thinking shakes up a team’s assumptions and pierces through the dogma. Design thinking emphasizes the customers’ needs. All else is secondary. Customer throughout this article could alternatively mean “user” or “stakeholder or other human”.
In the early 2000’s the elite Stanford d.school popularized design thinking for business. Over the past decade, design thinking has exploded across enterprises and startups alike. Hype reduces clarity. Design thinking prefers action over theory, so let us learn hands on. We start by imagining ourselves executives in a milkshake company.
Part II. Design Thinking: Hands On
Suppose you work at a company called Heavenly Milkshakes. Your company wants to provide the best milkshake in the world. If your company was product centered you might research questions such as, “is the best milkshake thicker, or sweeter, or colder?” Such is the product first mode of thinking.
We are going to turn this approach on its head and use design thinking to uncover new markets and improve the Heavenly Milkshakes customer experience. To get the full value out of this exercise, grab a few sheets of paper and a sharpie. Try to do each exercise on your own and then compare and blend your ideas with my example results.
Step 1. Plan A Workshop
The more diverse the better.
Write down 3–4 Heavenly Milkshake stakeholders who you will invite to your design thinking workshop.
Background
You cannot afford an intensive study, you need innovative ideas soon. Design thinking comes to your rescue. Design thinking techniques quickly and inexpensively generate ideas. The tools become even more powerful when used in a team environment. Design thinking can be a tremendous tool to leverage the diverse experiences and knowledge already present within your organization. Diverse backgrounds increase the breadth of human experiences and knowledge to draw on. The more diverse the team, the more creative the outcome.
The design thinking toolkit is not a rigid methodology. Design thinking techniques and facilitation exercises are selected appropriately for the problem and team. Here we taste a few example exercises. So step one is complete after you have gathered your cross functional team to research the problem at hand.
Step 1 Example:
Step 2. Empathize with the Users.
Consider two example milkshake customers Bob and Jane.
Jane: Arrives on weekday mornings around 630a.m. She never stays, and appears to be dressed for the c suite. Jane mentions she works in a town 1.5 hours away and enjoys milkshakes on her commute.
Bob: Usually visits Heavenly Milkshakes during the afternoon. Bob always brings children. Sometimes it appears he comes with friends and more children. You heard him mention he is a stay at home Dad.
These example archetype customers are based on actual customers your team serves each day. Now let us dive in and and conduct the first exercise. We are going to draw an empathy map. In a live workshop this would be drawn on a flip chart that the team can gather around.
Focus on Bob. In a live workshop you might split into two groups and report back findings for Bob and Jane as a group exercise. We will join the group focused on Bob. Think about Bob’s needs when he buys a milkshake. Think about people you know similar to Bob. What do you imagine, or what do you know, Bob is thinking, doing, saying, and feeling when he buys the milkshake. You can write words or pictures to describe your idea on post-its. There is no wrong answer.
Take three minutes and put down as many ideas as you can on post-it notes. Do not worry about perfect spelling or sketching. Just get the idea down.
Step 2. Example.
Here are the ideas I sketched. Add yours. Are they similar or different?
This exercise powerfully builds a teams understanding of the customer. Remember the diverse group you brought to the workshop? The accountant knows something about the customer different than the drive up window manager and vice versa. This design thinking exercise helped the team share those insights. The sharing spawns creative ideas.
The late business professor Clayton Christensen actually conducted a study about milkshake drinkers. He calls the product a “tool” which the customer is hiring to do a “job”.
I do not know if Christensen used this design thinking exercise, but the empathy map helps build understanding about the “job” your customer wants done. All products are created to fill needs. Possibly obvious, but the empathy map focus on customer need uncovers not so obvious “jobs”. You might say, well milkshakes are hired by hungry customers. But is that really why? Are Nike shoes hired for the job of foot protection or are they hired to show one is a sport minded individual? Are movie tickets purchased merely for entertainment , or do customers hire an hour to spend time with someone special? Do people really hire milkshakes just because they are hungry? Based on our design thinking exercise, it might be fair to say, your group found that Bob has “hired” the milkshake to do more than satisfy his craving. He has hired the milkshake to help him do the job of making it through the afternoon with his rowdy children.
Do you see how this approach can jump-start creative thinking for your milkshake business? This exercise shows you are not just competing against your cross town milkshake rival, you are competing against any alternative Bob might “hire” to help him manage his afternoon with the children. Other competition might be playgrounds, the mall, a friends house, or a babysitter.
Step 3: Brainstorm Big Ideas
Brainstorm as many ideas as possible which might improve Bob’s situation when he buys a milkshake. No idea is wrong, put them down on post-its. Words are fine, but pictures are better. You can describe the picture to your group. Take three minutes and use post-its.
Step 3: Example
Step 4: Prioritize.
The ideas will be as crazy and diverse as the team. Some people might have very similar ideas. To leverage the wisdom of the crowd, we are going to do a quick analysis of the ideas. Each team member gets three red dot stickers and three green dot stickers. Red represents the Big Ideas difficulty to implement. Green represent how much Bob, the customer, will value the Big Idea. Each person gets a voice. The three votes can be weighted all on one idea or spread out.
Step 4. Example
Step 5. Now sorting the results based on importance and feasibility, the team quickly sees there is a no brainier.
The “no brainer” idea is to provide extra napkins with a milk shake order. This will help Bob enjoy with messy children. The idea can be implemented very easily and could make a big difference in Bob’s experience at Heavenly Milkshakes.
Via a short workshop you have tapped into the creativity of your diverse team and built an initial list of potential new customer value propositions . I bet you have seen some of these other ideas implemented too: play areas and picnic tables?
This is the power of design thinking.
Part III. Summary
To summarize, there is a product first view and customer first view. Product first views risk ignoring why the product exists in the first place. In Seth Godin’s words, “don’t find customers for your product find products for your customer.”
Design thinking emphasizes everything -products, services, process and business in general- ultimately serves human desire and need. The product always serves the consumer, not the other way around. Every product, process, or service exists for human satisfaction. This human focus means design thinking can help teams solve problems anywhere you find humans. This is why you see design thinking popping up in product development, enterprise process improvement, technology design and implementation, marketing, community outreach, and government.
Design thinking exposes a group’s diverse experience and focuses it on customer needs. All enterprises, regardless of their assets or products, are caretakers of a unique set of relationships between three key stakeholders, the customer, the employee, and the supplier. Design thinking helps analyze these relationships. Sometimes you will hear them called customer experience, supplier experience, and employee experience. Such re-imagination quite often leads to transformational insights and outcomes. Your milkshake company uncovered many non-obvious ways to increase value.
None of this is to say a product approach or a customer approach is always superior. Nor do I argue each viewpoint is mutually exclusive. Design thinking happens to be a toolkit which helps focus on the customer. Both customer empathy and visionary product focus propel innovation. Some innovations fill a customer’s indescribable need. Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Navigating the tradeoffs between product and customer focus is the job of the effective leader.
Whilst the opinions in this article are solely my own, the following sources were relied upon and are excellent for deeper reading:
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen
Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
IBM Design Thinking Field Guide https://www.ibm.com/cloud/architecture/files/design-thinking-field-guide.pdf
IBM Enterprise Design Thinking https://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/
Standford d.school https://dschool.stanford.edu/
usability.gov https://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/personas.html
