Valorem Visions 1.16 – Design Thinking

In the latest episode of Valorem Visions, our experts, Charlie Barr and Javier Roca, discuss the power of Design Thinking in driving innovation and solving complex problems.

Transcript

Charlie - Design Thinking is less of a philosophy and more of a process. And this is sort of a response from early 2000s, Apple success. A lot of companies are looking at this idea of building products specifically for customers; that sort of moved into areas where companies like IDEO and others, consultancies were going in and saying there's actually a process that we can apply to it. It's more of a systematic process, less of a philosophy.

Charlie - You know, there's sort of this new trend which is where design thinking is really faced on as a user centered design or customer centered design. The whole goal is focusing on the user and there's sort of an evolution in that too where we have others to consider. There are the people who work at the company, there's the environment, the community that the company works in, and also the shareholders. The shareholders are an important part of this equation. So, there are these movements within design thinking to not just say user centered design, it could be more stakeholder centered design. So, like any process it is ever-changing and it's changing based on how a lot of companies in the market are trying to employ design thinking as a process and seeing successes and failures and adapting their approach.

Javier - I believe that you know digital transformation has complex problems that are undefined. Design thinking actually helps to solve these problems by doing like a collaboration and have an agile method. It's basically using like a kind of different steps to go through emphasize for the user, then define the problem, then find the solutions, and then test and build the solution.

Charlie - Oftentimes, there's a challenge of how do we communicate our process to help solve their problems and then also do what we can to help change their culture or to adapt to their culture and apply the design thinking methodology to another company that may not already have that in place.

Javier - And the other thing is that I believe design thinking is not just a practice, you know, with our customers, but also it's a way to collaborate within our different company with colleagues to find possible solutions. So, it's a very collaborative way that again you're working with a line between multiple teams, multiple people, and next stakeholders to kind of find the solution of what is the best.

Charlie - At least from our perspective when we're approaching a product or a client’s project, we will look at what are the steps that are needed to follow the design thinking process and then how can we carry that through during our engagement. And I know this is something that's also being talked about amongst not just Valorem but other Reply companies about how can we evangelize or advocate for design thinking methodology throughout different companies under the Reply umbrella.

Javier - The biggest thing is that you know design thinking can change the products that we develop also the processes. So, kind of evangelize the design thinking across culturally across the whole organization is important because at the end it's going to benefit not only our customers but also our teams and internally by being more efficient. So, it's just like an evangelized design thinking culture across all the different teams.