An Intersection of Agile, Lean & Design Thinking:

Agile, Lean and Design Thinking can be thought of three pillars of Product development.
By integrating the three approaches, we fill in the ethnographic and anthropological com-
ponent of solution building: lean startup, and agile in particular don't emphasize user ex-
perience and segmentation as part of their methodology. Agile is very focused on the it-
erative discovery of requirements, not problems. Lean is very focused on testing what we
think in the name of learning - which is closer to what we think when we think of design
thinking.

Author: Bhavana Mehta @IBM

Design Thinking & Lean Startup:
The Lean Startup is a methodology that imports ideas and tools from many other meth-
odologies like Design Thinking, Lean Manufacturing and Agile software development.
In The Lean Startup you look to known your users, your customers, and to find and solve
problems or needs these actually have. You do this by running experiments and constant-
ly testing your hypothesis to get further validated learning, typically around product-
market fit in the initial stages of a startup.
The Lean Startup includes many ideas from Design Thinking (with a special focus on
Customer/Problem fit discovery), nevertheless these are different methodologies.
There are many differences between the two methodologies but the fundamental one is
that the lean startup ultimate goal is to discover a business model that works for a
startup. Though of course you will also bring business considerations into a Design
Thinking process through empathy, this does not necessarily have to produce a Business
Model, nor does it have to be ran in the context of a startup.

In a nutshell, if you learn and practice Design Thinking you will become much better
equipped to tackle Problem/Customer fit within the Lean Startup.
Design Thinking & Agile Manifesto
Like Design Thinking, Agile emphasizes collaboration and individuals, but it has its own
language and methodologies. The core manifesto outlines some key principles, and then
teams typically use methodologies like Scrum , Sprints , Retrospectives to execute. The
two don’t exactly conflict, but they don’t mesh seamlessly either. Agile is usually con-
trasted with waterfall and so teams using Agile often feel a great deal of restlessness to
“just start coding”. Teams trying to mix Agile and Design Thinking often run into some
tension about how much time to spend on the Design Thinking part, and when it’s time to

Author: Bhavana Mehta @IBM

start coding. In the worst case, where different parts of the team are following different
frameworks, there can be serious conflict. Hence Design Sprint could be a solution in
such cases, It brings all three Agile, lean and Design Thinking through a systematic ap-
proach.

Design Sprint - A Combo of Design thinking, Agile and Lean:

Traditional approach focuses more on the “What we are making?”, Design thinking
brings in a more “Customer-Centric” approach to the entire product development process.
It helps to validate whether the product and the features being developed meets the mar-
ket expectation. Agile practices in turn aid teams to develop the product incrementally in
a collaborative and iterative manner. Improved collaboration and finding the right Prod-
uct-Market fit are the key drivers for adopting the new approach. The advantages include
but are not limited to the following :

 Cost of failure in an incremental and iterative approach is less when compared to

the traditional model.

 Develop only what customer’s need rather than getting into a feature creep. This
results in effective utilization of resources in addressing the relevant pain points

 Collaborative development brings in group think, focus on a common goal and

better scope for innovation.

 The design sprint is a sprint of one to three week duration which makes use of de-
sign thinking, lean and agile practices focused on validating a specific problem
hypothesis. The idea is to get a "Minimum Viability Product" and get early feed-
back to validate this hypothesis. Design sprint is the same as a regular design pro-
cess, but is condensed in a way that it could be accomplished from start to finish
within a single sprint.

Stages in Design Sprint

Preparation - During the preparation stage, the team identifies and agrees upon the prob-
lem statement and research around its assumptions. You can use the tools such as busi-
ness model canvas, etc. to get a good understanding of the customers and the business.
The teams also work on identifying the problems and the most risky assumptions within.
They quickly arrive to narrow down their goals into actionable items.
Research - During this step, the teams try to do a study to gather more information about
the problem. This could include customer interviews, competitive research, secondary
research, etc. These sessions may include tools such as the Empathy maps, etc.
Analysis - In this step, each of the team gathers to present their research findings indi-
vidually and the group collectively discuss and arrive at a common understanding of the
findings and the priority of the problem statements. Innovation games and tools such as
Product Box, Speed boat, etc. helps you to identify customer requirements and develop
better release plans.

Author: Bhavana Mehta @IBM

Ideation - In this step, the teams individually pick the problem statement and try to come
up with their solution ideas. The team members can use tools such as sketches, wire-
frames, low-fidelity prototypes, etc. Techniques such as crazy 8s helps you to quickly
come up with lots if ideas. The teams once again meet to present each of their ideas and
do a short brainstorming. Out of these the top one or two ideas are voted and picked for a
prototype
Prototyping - In this step, teams pick the top one or two idea solutions and works on de-
veloping a prototype. High-fidelity prototype tools such as Storyboard, Axure, UXPin,
Powtoons, mockups, etc. can be used to build a quick visual prototype of the solution.
The plan here is to validate the assumptions on the idea solution and prototypes provide a
easy visual way for the same.
Validation - The last step is validation. Here, the stakeholders are invited and present-
ed with the prototype to seek their feedback. This allows for testing the solution idea over
the problem statement arrived at stage 1. Based on the feedback received, the stage 1 - 6
are iterated over again or teams start to make the prototype into a final solution.
Advantage of Design Sprint:
It’s a very quick and focused way of taking a problem and working a viable solution
Group think and innovation games helps you to brainstorm and resolve the problems in
an innovative manner
Design thinking brings in a Customer-Centric approach to the problem.
Least expensive - With minimal investment you will be able to work on a viable solution
to the problem.
There doesn’t have to be though, and so we wanted to show in the workshop a selection
of practices from each which are complimentary.

Aside Both Design Thinking and Agile emphasize people over processes, and so I
would always recommend only following the activities here to the extent that they work
for you and your team. I want to provide a really specific example of how the practices
can be applied, but I don’t want teams to think that this is the only way to do it. I would
always encourage teams to deviate in an instant if they think another activity or practice
would be more helpful at a particular moment.
If the activities described by the two frameworks are a buffet, the team had a chance to
try a little spoonful from some of the menu items.
Because Design Thinking is fundamentally about user empathy we asked each group to
arrive with some basic information about their existing or target user demographics.
Which User Stories need to be implemented first release, and which could we defer to
later releases? This lets us roughly prioritize our work. The next step is to focus on the

Author: Bhavana Mehta @IBM

first release and prioritize our features into a Product Backlog . What is the highest im-
pact user story, what is the second highest? We create an ordered list.
Taking the user-centric Journey Map the team has created we draw a literal line under it
and switch to identifying the work we as a product team would need to implement to de-
liver that experience. What we call an Experience Roadmap. What product features
would we need to design and implement? Catalog that work in terms of User Stories
(the kind you would put in JIRA, or your project planning tool). The typical form of “ As
a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason> ”. Very similar to the
Hills, but now we’re at the level of individual features to implement, so we probably have
20 to 30 user stories at this level.
The next step is to Prioritize them. The activity we used was to ask the teams to consid-
er delivering their experience over a series of three releases, what we called a “Cupcake,
Birthday Cake and Wedding Cake”. The analogy is to represent that the first release
won’t contain everything, but it should be a satisfying piece of value on its own, at least
for that group of people who only want “some kind of cake” and don’t actively need a
wedding cake day 1.
Once we have a Product Backlog, we had the team conduct a final exercise to size each
story. Planning Poker is the activity we used to do this. Planning Poker has the team
roughly sizes each story based on how much work they think it is using a series of
numbered cards . Teams make hidden estimations of work, and then discuss and disa-
greements until a consensus is arrived at. Because we have cross functional teams, we’re
estimating not just the code or test required to implement, but also the design, copy writ-
ing, photography, documentation, globalization and all other aspects needed to say a user
story is “done”.
Planning Poker is a great approach because it sizes stories relative to each other, and
doesn’t get into the political nightmare of deciding exactly how many man hours a story
is. It helps focus the conversation on the work required, not the pressure to execute that
work in a particular timeframe.
If you are interested to explore further then have a look at "RoadMap for Design Think-
ing Implementation for Projects/Enhancements":

Roadmap for Design Thinking Implementation for Microsoft

Design Thinking - Origin, Framework, Roleplay, Career Path, Agile & Lean Design
Thinking

Author: Bhavana Mehta @IBM