Design Thinking

The problem

During my early career as a UX designer I remember being frustrated with getting my team and product leadership to think about the user, speed up ideation, and blaze our own path instead of following what others would do. I didn’t know how to encourage our team to look past quantitative data and consider the marriage between qualitative and quantitive data. Ultimately I realized that the problem was really me.

The frustration

Why was the problem ultimately me? I wasn’t really communicating, teaching, encouraging and leading. My frustration was about myself and my way of approaching my team & problems. I then found out about the approach to problem solving called “Design Thinking” popularized by David Kelley of IDEO. Building software is a team sport and there is a huge benefit to harnessing the differing perspectives and train of thought of our teammates who were trained in see problems from a specific view. Together, we participate in defining the empathize, define, ideate , prototype and test…together.

The learnings

I spent a lot of time learning more about design thinking, applying it and even teaching it. After I left CVS Health I was rehired as a contractor just to run workshop and teach others how to run workshops. Design thinking has been applied at work and in many different aspects of my life (with my wife as a partner to go through the design thinking process with.)