Book Review: Designing for Growth

Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers

I started this book in December. Just finished it this week. It is an introduction to design thinking. It was straightforward. It was simple to understand. I'll confess I found the book very boring. It may not have helped that I tried to cover a lot of it as an audiobook while driving to and from Chicago.

Design thinking is basically a way to operationalize creativity. The book's basic thesis is that managers often don't feel like they are particularly creative or innovative, even though they need to be. Similarly, designers are often far more creative than they are organized. This book is meant to create a Reese's Peanut Butter cup that mixes the peanut butter of the manager with the chocolate of the designer.

It is very useful. The four basic steps are:

1. What is? -- Where are you currently in your organization?

2. What if? -- This is a phase of focused brainstorming.

3. What wows? -- This phase involves actually prototyping and talking to potential customers for input.

4. What works? -- Going beyond prototyping, you do a learning launch with a small sample.'

That all makes sense. The ten steps that the four questions expand out into are:

1. Visualization -- necessary throughout

What is?

A four-step project management sequence is interspersed with these four questions. The first project management step is to have a "Design Brief" that clarifies what problem you are trying to solve and sets kicks off the designing process.

2. Journey mapping -- looking at things from the customer side

3. Value Chain mapping -- looking at things from the organizational side

4. Mind mapping -- Get a group together to find patterns in those mappings. This is a crucial step to determine where you currently are as an organization.

What if? 

The project management tool emerging from the first question is Design Criteria. Hopefully, you now have insight into where your organization is. What are the perceptions of your organization? What is the ideal end state of the process for your organization?

5. Brainstorming -- Giving clearly defined parameters, begin to generate ideas that address anecdotes and stories depicting the problems you are trying to solve. Keep iterating by asking probing questions that question your assumptions, explore the extremes, look back from the future, etc.

6. Concept Development -- Now choose the best ideas that emerged out of the brainstorming process. Combine them. Mix and match them. Look for that spark of creativity.

What wows?

You kick off pursuit of the third question with a "Napkin Pitch." What does the customer want? What assets does your organization have to give? How will the customer benefit? What is the competition?

7.  Assumption Testing -- Begin to plan out how you are going to test the assumptions with which you have emerged from concept development. Will your new concept pass basic business tests like 1) will customers buy it, 2) can you create and deliver it, 3) can you scale it, and 4) how easily can competitors copy you?

8. Rapid Prototyping -- Fake creating the new service or entity. Run it by a very small number of people for feedback. "Fail fast to succeed sooner."

What now?

You launch the final stage with "The Learning Guide." How are you going to test the direction in which you are heading? How much is it going to cost? What remaining assumptions do you need to test?

9. Customer Co-Creation -- Bring some potential customers in and get their input. 

10. Learning Launch -- Now build a more realistic version of your product or service and try it out on a small sample with a small team working on it. A couple months, maybe 100 people. Don't spend too much but spend enough to know whether you're really on to something.