Challenges in Design Thinking Process

Design Thinking is a human-centered, iterative design process consisting of 5 steps — Empathize,

Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Design Thinking can help businesses understand and simplify
the consumer’s journey and add value across industries and functions.

Some of the business challenges that companies face while aligning their businesses for a design
culture are:

1. Short-term thinking

Most times Design Thinking is applied only while developing a particular product or in the

execution of a particular project. However, Design Thinking should be inbuilt in the long-term

strategy of the organization. Organizations will have to envision the entire ecosystem around the

consumer and apply principles of Design Thinking to every phase. One example of such an

approach is, Paytm which started as a mobile recharge platform to one of the largest mobile

payments platform with over 7 million merchants and 300 million registered wallet users, and

now a major e-commerce platform. Paytm reached at this point by envisioning the entire

ecosystem and possibilities around consumers that their platform could solve, and then created a

delightful solution around it.

2. Challenges of scale and pace

Digitization has exploded the number of touchpoints through which businesses interact with

consumers. Today enterprises have to interact with their consumers at numerous channels, in a

world where the time to respond has come to near zero. It can be a challenging task to apply

Design Thinking at every touch point and innovate and engage at a fast rate. Businesses should

prioritize the channels and then apply Design Thinking principles to their channels in a phase-

wise manner.
3. Building a design culture

In most organization Design Thinking is limited to product teams. Either there is a team of

designers that are rotated across teams or having a designer for every product team. While

organizations have to identify their own approach basis their organizational culture, to reap the

true benefits of Design Thinking businesses will need to ingrain a Design Thinking approach

across every function. For instance, Airbnb has identified a unique approach where every project

team at Airbnb has a project manager whose explicit role is to represent the user, not a particular

functional group like engineering or design.

4. Designers’ and product stakeholders’ perfectionist block

One of the basic principles of a Design Thinking approach is that it is iterative, agile and data and

analytics-driven. However, in most cases, product stakeholders get stuck with wanting to launch a

‘perfect’ product. And, that is one of the major roadblocks in the Design Thinking approach. To

adopt a Design Thinking approach enterprises should be prepared to launch a Minimum Viable

Product and then iterate it basis consumer feedback and data and then scale further in a step-by-

step manner.

Conclusion:

Technology, business environment and changing consumer preference is opening doors for new

competitors as well as newer opportunities. To succeed companies will need to innovate faster

and evolve with changing consumer preferences. Adopting a Design Thinking approach has

become more critical than ever before for succeeding and staying competitive in today’s digital

world.