A couple of years back I posted a story that said “I believe in design thinking as a philosophy, and it is my way of life.” One of my closest friends pinged back asking what I actually meant by that. I told him I’d write a piece about it.
Here it is, buddy.
The first time I presented an analysis to my team at ManageEngine, my voice shook. It was a proposal we’d been working on for our product, and the room had a couple of content writers, designers, and the development DRIs in it. Every one of them was way more experienced than I was.
For the first ten minutes I wasn’t presenting. I was listening to myself present. Watching my own voice for cracks, managing my hands, tracking how I sounded instead of what I was saying.
I was thinking my stage fright is making everyone uncomfortable which made it even worse for me.
What settled me was the questions. People started asking things, I had answers, and somewhere in answering I forgot to monitor myself. I got comfortable. That room had come for what the analysis said, and once I understood that, my voice stopped being the thing I was managing.
Growing up, I didn’t have many people to learn from when it came to supporting someone who was struggling.
So through my early twenties I fumbled most of those conversations. A friend would tell me something heavy and I’d reach straight for the fix. Have you tried this? Why don’t you just do that, it seems obvious. I thought I was helping. I was solving.
Somebody made a short film about this exact impulse. It is uncomfortably accurate.
It took me years to learn this, and a fair number of conversations I’d like to have back. Most of the time, people just want to let the frustration out. They want a listening ear and some room. They usually find the solution themselves once someone has sat with them in it for a while.
In my previous product, a user wrote in asking for something small. He wanted to select every device in a table view at once and push an app update to all of them. Like Gmail, where selecting the 100 emails on screen offers you “select all in this folder.”
Easy enough to spec. We could have built exactly that and closed the ticket.
A call with him revealed what was actually going on. He was selecting every device in his company, well over a hundred, and pushing app updates. Every day, and many times overnight. A repetitive, error-prone chore that ate into his workday and his sleep.
So what is design thinking?
Design thinking is a way of solving problems that starts with people, not the solution or its constraints.
That will sound like a poster in PM courses (and it usually is), but it’s much bigger than that.
Knowing my audience cared about what the analysis said got me out of my own head and into the work. Knowing my friend wanted space to vent made me a better friend. Knowing my user had a chore he should never have had let me ideate toward automating it away, rather than shaving two clicks off it.
The idea is this: whatever problem you encounter, ask yourself three things.
- Why does this person want this? (and “this person” could be you)
- What do they need from me right now?
- What are they not saying that they need just as much?
Do this before you reach for a solution.
And that, my friend, is why I believe design thinking to be a way of life.
Only one of those experiences was a product problem. The stance you take at work when you’re trying to figure out what a user actually needs is the same stance that makes you decent to the people around you. It stays on well after the PRD is done. Understand the people at stake and what they expect from you, then decide what to make.
Do that consistently and good product instincts will stop feeling like a professional skill and start feeling like a personality trait.