Die Begriffe Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Agile habt Ihr bestimmt schon alle einmal gehört. Worin liegen aber die Unterschiede bzw. wie passt das alles zusammen? Das schauen wir uns heute einmal an.
It probably makes more sense to just look at Design Thinking, Lean, Design Sprint & Agile as a bunch of tools and techniques in one’s toolbox, rather than argue for one over the other, because they can all add value somewhere on the innovation spectrum.
Design Thinking
Design Thinking really shines when we need to better understand the problem space and identify the early adopters. There are various flavors of design thinking, but they all sort of follow the double-diamond flow. Simplistically the first diamond starts by diverging and gathering lots of insights through talking to our target stakeholders, followed by converging through clustering these insights and identifying key pain-points, problems or jobs to be done. The second diamond starts by a diverging exercise to ideate a large number of potential solutions before prototyping and testing the most promising ideas. Design Thinking is mainly focussed on qualitative rather than quantitative insights.Lean Startup
The slight difference with Design Thinking is that the entrepreneur (or intrapreneur) often already has a good understanding of the problem space. Lean considers everything to be a hypothesis or assumption until validated …so even that good understanding of the problem space is just an assumption. Lean tends to starts by specifying your assumptions on a customer focussed (lean) canvas and then prioritizing and validating the assumptions according to highest risk for the entire product. The process to validate assumptions is creating an experiment (build), testing it (measure) and learn whether our assumption or hypothesis still stands. Lean uses qualitative insights early on but later forces you to define actionable quantitative data to measure how effective the solution addresses the problem and whether the growth strategy is on track. The “Get out of the building” phrase is often associated with Lean Startup, but the same principle of reaching out the customers obviously also counts for Design Thinking (… and Design Sprint … and Agile).Design Sprint
It appears that the Google Venture-style Design Sprint method could have its roots from a technique described in the Lean UX book. The key strength of a Design Sprint is to share insights, ideate, prototype and test a concept all in a 5-day sprint. Given the short timeframe, Design Sprints only focus on part of the solution, but it’s an excellent way to learn really quickly if you are on the right track or not.Agile
Just like dealing with the uncertainty of our problem, solution and market assumptions, agile development is a great way to cope with uncertainty in product development. No need to specify every detail of a product up-front, because here too there are plenty of assumptions and uncertainty. Agile is a great way to build-measure-learn and validate assumptions whilst creating a Minimum Viable Product in Lean Startup parlance. We should define and prioritize a backlog of value to be delivered and work in short sprints, delivering and testing the value as part of each sprint.
