I had an aversion to the phrase “fail fast” for many years. To me, it implied a sense of carelessness and was a reminder of the first .com boom and bust, in which plenty of early .com companies did indeed fail fast because they did not value nor pay any attention to basic business fundamentals. As I learned more about agile and design thinking, the idea of “fail fast” morphed (for me) into an understanding that this meant building working prototypes to get early customer feedback as well as attempting technically challenging work early, all for the purpose of learning from early “failures.”
I still don’t think it is accurate to call these early prototypes “failures.” Practically speaking, these are really not failures but rather iterative prototypes that help turn early information on the needs and wants of the customer into working models that customers can interact with. This iterative process is (to me) more like a series of successes than failing fast – but I did not create design thinking or its vocabulary, so we’re stuck with “fail fast.” In addition to discussing how agile and design thinking are complementary approaches to creating and delivering solutions, I’ll share two practical examples showing how the hybrid of design thinking and agile helped teams and organizations I led deliver some innovative, customer-focused technology products.
As we get started, please note that in addition to my own experiences described here, I reviewed some excellent source materials including a Harvard Business Review article and a TED Talk by Tim Brown (2008), a TEDx Berkeley talk by Guy Kawasaki (The Art of Innovation, 2014), videos and articles from the Neilsen Norman Group, and a YouTube video by William Burnett of Stanford on design thinking (2016). These sources provided historical materials for the origins of design thinking and solidified my understanding of design thinking and its relationship to agile practices.
What Is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a user-centric method for developing solutions that meet customer needs. When used in combination with agile practices, design thinking can help organizations identify customer needs and rapidly iterate through prototypes that ultimately enable organizations to design and create solutions that provide value to their customers. Design thinking and agile both leverage foundational concepts and mindsets that are, in some cases, new, different, and potentially challenging for organizations to implement.
Design thinking is usually attributed to Roger Martin of the Rotman School; David Kelley, founder of IDEO; and Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO – all three are influential in naming the process of design thinking and the evolution and advancement of design thinking, starting in the 1990s. The approaches that are used in design thinking trace back even farther (much like the methods that form the roots of agile and Scrum), but like agile and Scrum, became well-known more recently (1990s) through the work of these and other prominent thinkers and practitioners (Gibbons, 2016).
Design thinking takes practitioners through specific phases culminating in a testable prototype that, if successful with customers, is ready for the organization to implement. Agile practices are supported by design thinking and also support aspects such as rapid prototyping and implementation. There are similarities between design thinking and agile practices which allow organizations already using agile methods to incorporate design thinking processes without major changes to their existing processes.
Shared Concepts – Agile and Design Thinking
Design thinking shares several elements with agile practices. The customer-centric approach and the use of rapid and iterative prototypes with the expectation that customer feedback will steer the team toward the best outcome are shared by design thinking and agile. Both practices are centered around the human experience and require that we understand the customer context in order to fully comprehend the problem or opportunity for which we want to design a new product or service offering.
Both agile and design thinking require input from outside of the teams working on the product. Most frequently, this comes through close interaction with customers. For design thinking, this may be user research, business needs, and technology possibilities. For software development, this may be backlogs, user stories, and success metrics (Cooper-Wright, 2016). Both agile and design thinking leverage iterative and ongoing refinement. Empathy and empowerment are key shared concepts that both enable teams to empathize with customers as well as the empowerment to bring that experience into their work.
User-Focused Design
Design thinking and agile leverage user-focused design. The agile concept of the “user story” with its focus on value outcomes for the customer or user supports this concept. The concept is shared with design thinking in that design thinking asks that the teams place themselves in the customer’s “world” and form some theories about what the customers might want based on this empathy. In two examples I’ll share later, we’ll see how viewing the world through the lived experiences of your customer helps with the design and development of products and solutions.
Problem-Solving
Problem-solving with design thinking and agile is different from many other processes. I think the biggest difference is that both techniques begin without assuming research and data will be collected upfront. Other approaches to product and software development assume that a lot of quantitative data and detailed requirements will be gathered before starting. However, agile project methods and design thinking methods assume that qualitative data will be gathered through empathetic experiences with customers at the start of the process.
Cross-Functional Teams
Agile and design thinking rely on multidisciplinary cross-functional teams in order to achieve success. Rather than reach outside of the team to get specific information or expertise when needed, both approaches assume that various disciplines such as creative, engineering or technical, user experience, testing, content – whatever it takes – will be part of a cohesive team. This is easier said than done, as it is likely that some challenges will arise in this environment. It is critical that all the disciplines respect each other’s specialties and recognize that pitching in outside of one’s specialty is critical to creating great outcomes.
Rapid Prototyping with Customer Feedback
Agile and design thinking are rooted in the concept of getting working prototypes in front of customers and then responding to their feedback. In agile, this is baked into the sprint review and demo at the end of each of an agile team’s sprint. In design thinking, the concept is applied to build rapid and inexpensive prototypes. These could be wireframes for software user interfaces, click-through demo pages, or inexpensive working models of products. However they manifest, these rapid prototypes allow customers to interact with the prototype and provide feedback at a point in the process where changes can be made quickly and cheaply. As customers interact with the prototypes, they can offer ideas that can be immediately incorporated into the next prototype and tested or experienced to see how they really work and feel to customers.
Failing Fast Revisited
Earlier, I complained about the phrase “failing fast.” As I noted, before I really understood what it meant in the context of agile and then design thinking, it sounded to me like “working carelessly.” Clearly not the case.
In agile and design thinking, failing fast means using rapid prototyping to find out quickly what works and what does not work – whether from the customer’s perspective or from a technical achievement perspective. The early prototypes that fail to meet customer’s needs still provide valuable information through the customer’s responses and reactions to them. The same applies to technical experiments that show the team what does not work while iterating toward what does.
This in turn helps each successive prototype get closer and closer to something that will really work. In this way, the fast pace of rapid prototyping and the learning from each “failure” allow the teams to essentially fail quickly and iteratively toward a successful outcome that will meet the customer’s needs as well as enable the development and construction of a successful product.
Alignment – Agile and Design Thinking
The phases and processes of design thinking don’t necessarily align exactly with agile processes. They do, however, strongly support agile projects and help to provide foundational elements that both support and align with the way agile projects are run. Design thinking uses a process in which the phases help the agile team create new and innovative solutions to meet customer needs and help solve a specific problem. They help the agile team lay a solid foundation for a successful project that will deliver value by meeting customer’s needs through innovative products and solutions.
Design Thinking Phases
Design thinking typically uses these phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Some organizations will add implement to these phases. Agile projects can align with these phases depending on where the agile project is in its life cycle. Assuming the phases and the agile project are both at inception, the design thinking phases can work in concert to provide the agile project inputs and outputs needed to move the project forward.
As design thinking’s empathize and define phases lead to definition of a problem statement, this aligns with the agile practice of creating a vision statement which in turn is an important part of the inception process of an agile project. The ideation phase in design thinking can lead to user stories, and the rapid prototyping lends itself to time-boxed agile sprints that end with demos and get prototypes into the hands of customers to test.
Design Thinking Activities
The empathize phase activities are not purely about understanding the discrete needs of the customer but also about fully understanding the environment in which the customer exists and how that shapes their needs. By directly observing the customer and their environment, design thinking and agile can derive data that creates not only empathy but starts the process of feature and user story development that helps to create the agile project’s product backlog.
Some organizations (like the two examples we’ll review shortly) go into the field with their customers to gain experience. Ideation can extend this work further as the team considers ideas that could address the problems they’ve discovered through this field empathy work. An organization’s activities at this point may not be specifically called “ideation,” but likely will follow their field activities as teams discuss what they have seen and learned and begin to develop ideas of how they could address the needs and problems they have witnessed and are beginning to understand.
Design thinking phases are intended to be performed sequentially. This sequence aligns in some ways to the agile life cycle and helps lay a foundation for a successful agile project. The empathize phase in which direct observation and collection of quantitative data is performed ensures that the project team fully understands the customer’s context as well as their needs prior to the creation of user stories. The define phase ensures that the customer problem or need is defined clearly and enables the agile team to create a vision statement for the project that resonates with the entire team. Ideation provides the agile team the opportunity to consider a variety of possible solutions prior to rapid prototyping.
Outcomes
Application of design thinking within the context of agile projects provides key outcomes that, as noted earlier, create solid foundational elements that can help to enable a successful project outcome. Empathizing with customers helps the agile team really understand their needs and ensures that they keep the customer’s context and lived experiences in mind when they are designing solutions and creating and testing them.
Clearly defining the problem is an important outcome and input to the agile project in that it enables the creation of the vision statement that is part of project inception. Ideation leads to options to solve the problem and deliver the vision that can then be rapidly prototyped. Ideas not only help to define possible prototypes, but also enable the creation of the user stories that the agile team needs to attempt to develop these prototypes. Testing validates the solutions with customers as well as ultimately defines whether the agile team has delivered something of value to customers through their work in each sprint.
Practical Examples – Design Thinking with Agile
From 2005 to 2012, I worked for a biotechnology firm in Madison, Wisconsin, called Promega Corporation. This is where I first worked using a hybrid of agile and design thinking practices, both intentionally and unintentionally. In 2012, I joined a consulting firm that included an ecommerce software startup called CloudCraze, which in 2018 became part of Salesforce. While with CloudCraze, I continued to learn more about and use agile and design thinking to develop and implement our ecommerce software product. The following are two practical examples that illustrate the use of a hybrid of agile and design thinking to develop and deliver software products.
Promega and STR Normalization Manager
Have you ever watched one of those CSI shows where the crime scene investigators drop a DNA sample off at the crime lab and hours later get to see a 3-D touchscreen showing who the suspect is and where they are located? DNA analysis doesn’t work like that. Crime labs around the country are backed up with unprocessed DNA samples because it is a precise and painstaking process that can be accelerated to some extent with laboratory automation and robotics and software.
Promega sought to improve part of this process through the normalization of DNA samples. Depending on the quality of a DNA sample, it yields a “signal” that varies in strength. When using laboratory automation, normalizing this signal is critical to accurate and consistent results. Promega R&D scientists and bioinformatics researchers conceived a prototype DNA normalization software tool and wanted to bring it to market. That’s where my colleagues and I got involved. The CEO asked our IT leader to provide a team to collaborate with product management and R&D to harden the prototype and develop it as commercial-grade software.
Promega’s customers were crime lab scientists. Promega had former CSIs and crime lab managers on the product management team for this project. This enabled our team to use user-centric design to develop lab automation software to help these scientists process DNA samples more efficiently. Their ideas on what these customers might want in a future product combine with the user story and backlog process. Rather than try surveys and focus groups, the scientists worked directly from their customer’s point of view. Promega’s own human identity scientists also provided a customer-centric input, as they both used and tested the initial prototype and subsequent iterative prototypes.
Our team consisted of two former crime lab managers as product managers, two scientists, an informatics developer, a UX designer, two software developers, and a project manager. This multidisciplinary cross-functional team collaborated to empathize with and define their customers’ problems and then ideate solutions. Using the rapid prototyping approach, we created prototypes of the software that would normalize the signals from various DNA samples and create a file optimized for specific laboratory automation equipment. The team demo’d to crime lab customers as well as internal scientists for feedback. The feedback from both external and internal customers enabled the team to rapid prototype through versions with enhanced internal testing features and user interface improvements.
We quickly moved into a cadence of rapid prototyping that put a new version of the software in front of our internal and external customers every week. Internal customers would test immediately and provide feedback on new or revised features, while the product managers – the former crime lab people – would get versions to their customers and solicit feedback that could be incorporated into the product. Halfway into the scheduled project timeline, the prototype was solid enough to install in a crime lab for a prominent national law enforcement agency for a week of onsite testing. We ultimately completed and shipped the 1.0 version of the software in time for a major industry tradeshow.
CloudCraze and Coca-Cola
Some of the early adopters of CloudCraze’s B2B ecommerce system were Coca-Cola bottling groups in the United States, Germany, and Belgium, the first being the group that bottled and sold Coca-Cola products in Belgium and the Netherlands. In order to better understand how the owners of small stores and distributors in these markets placed orders with this Coca-Cola bottler to in turn understand how to design an ecommerce system that would work for them, a team from Coca-Cola and CloudCraze spent days in the field observing how these customers worked and what problems they faced when ordering and reordering product.
Our CloudCraze development team consisted of a product manager with deep experience on both sides of B2B, a software architect experienced in front-end and back-end development, another developer with more front-end and UX experience, and a project manager. We learned from Coca-Cola’s customers that they needed to be able to start a product inventory refill order on their tablets or smartphones while walking the shelves in the warehouse or store, and then continue the order on their desktop computer. Leveraging this user-centric perspective along with agile practices, we defined the problem and thought about how we could adapt our software and existing user experience to meet the needs of these customers.
We iterated through several prototype user interfaces (wireframes of desktop and mobile web pages, then click-through mockups) with different options before their feedback told us which design to work with. We launched the overall software implementation project for Coca-Cola and stuck with our two-week agile sprint cadence. With each sprint, we were able to iterate versions of the desktop and mobile ordering experience software incorporating customer feedback until we reached a version that was ready to test with actual customers in the field. This field testing provided additional feedback that we incorporated prior to going live.
Hopefully these two examples helped to illustrate similarities and shared values between design thinking processes and agile. The examples from Promega and CloudCraze show how design thinking and agile practices combine to create successful products that solve real customer problems through innovative solutions.
Summary
Design thinking methods are highly supportive of and complementary to agile approaches to projects and product development. A hybrid approach to projects and products combining the elements of design thinking and agile allows people and organizations to learn about and focus on the needs of their customers, iterating through the design and development process through rapid prototyping. While sometimes referred to as “failing fast,” this approach really means “getting something in front of the customer to react to and provide feedback.”
The next chapter will discuss the unique role of the executive leader in agile environments and how the mindset and performance of this leader is extremely influential on the success of the methodology, the morale and performance of the teams, and the projects and products it is used to create and deliver.