5 Design Thinking Skills for Business Professionals

What do companies such as Apple, Moderna, IBM, T-Mobile, Ford, Barclays, and Nike have in common? Each has embraced the concept of design thinking in their development of new products and services—and been rewarded for doing so.

Design thinking is a powerful tool all professionals can benefit from. By developing design thinking skills, you can become a more creative problem-solver, regardless of your role. This, in turn, can empower you to embrace and facilitate innovation within your organization to effect real, lasting change.

Here’s a look at what design thinking is, design thinking skills you should develop to advance your career, and the types of professionals who can benefit most from those skills.

What Is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is an approach to problem-solving in which the practitioner seeks to understand a potential product or service’s end user, including their goals, challenges, and aspirations. They then use that knowledge to conceive solutions.

As a methodology, design thinking is meant to be iterative. It constantly forces the practitioner to challenge their assumptions about the problem, the user, and the solution as a means of verifying they’re correct—or forcing innovation to find a more accurate answer.

Design thinking is typically broken out into four key phases:

1. Clarify: In this phase, the practitioner narrows down the focus of the design thinking process. They identify the problem that will be explored to ensure the best possible outcome.
2. Ideate: In this phase, the practitioner generates ideas for solutions. They should regularly challenge their assumptions to overcome biases and think of truly unique and innovative ideas.
3. Develop: In this phase, the practitioner experiments with the solutions they conceived in the ideate phase. Prototypes should not be expensive or considered “final,” but rather as tools to test and learn from.
4. Implement: Finally, the practitioner must test each prototype. The goal is to learn and collect as much data as possible and use it to further iterate on potential solutions.

While the four phases feed into each other, the implement phase is not meant to be the end of the line; instead, it’s a trigger to revisit the earlier phases and iterate on both the problem and solution.

Design Thinking Skills

1. Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is a core skill for anyone interested in design thinking. This is because design thinking requires the practitioner to empathize with the end user and understand their dreams, goals, desires, and challenges on an intimate, personal level. Without the willingness to empathize, none of the other phases in the design thinking process can be completed.

In addition to empathy, other important emotional intelligence skills you should develop to connect with your ideal users include self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation.

2. Consensus Building

In the early phases of the design thinking process, it’s important for all team members to come to a consensus on the challenge being addressed. Who’s the ideal buyer or end user of the product or solution? What’s the problem being solved for? How will you define success? Without agreement around these questions, the entire process can break down and be stalled by inaction.

By becoming skilled in consensus building, you can ensure your project is always moving forward. That doesn’t mean your team will always be right just because they agree on something or that you shouldn’t challenge assumptions. Even failure can provide data you can use to improve the next iteration of a solution.

Problem framing is a tool often used in design thinking when a team doesn’t agree on a solution. It requires team members to take a step back and reframe the problem they’re trying to solve. This simple act can give everyone clarity and help build consensus around a solution while ruling out those that don’t address the problem.

3. User Research

User research is the act of understanding a product or service’s end user to get a better sense of the problems they face, their goals, and the unique criteria they’ll use to identify a solution. It’s through user research that you can begin to empathize with your end user, define and frame the problem, and ideate.

There are many methods you can use to complete this research. Some of the most effective include:

• User surveys: Surveys can be an extremely valuable way to collect a large amount of user data that informs your process. In designing user surveys, it’s critical to avoid mistakes that could adversely affect your results.
• User interviews: In a user interview, you speak with someone you consider your product or service’s ideal customer or end user. You then ask them questions that reveal key details about their needs and wants.
• Direct observation: Direct observation involves finding someone you consider to be your ideal end user, then observing them as they complete a task. For example, you might ask them to use your product or solve a problem.

With user research, practice makes perfect. The more you perform, the more comfortable you become—helping you be more effective the next time you’re tasked with it.

4. Journey Mapping

Journey mapping is the process of charting your target customer or end user’s journey as they choose a solution to their problem. What are they seeing, feeling, and thinking?

A journey map typically has three stages:

• Awareness of a problem or need: The individual becomes aware of the symptoms of a problem, challenge, or opportunity but doesn’t yet know how to define it.
• Consideration of possible solutions: The individual has defined their problem or opportunity and is now considering different options for moving forward.
• Deciding how best to proceed: The individual has narrowed down their options and is now making their final decision.

These stages aren’t necessarily linear. One person can, for example, spend years being aware of a problem or goal, then rapidly consider options and make a final decision. Another person might move back and forth between the first two stages but never move into the final one. Someone might also proceed through all three stages, only to realize they were solving the wrong problem, prompting them to return to the awareness stage.

Journey mapping is a crucial skill for anyone interested in design thinking. It should be informed by user research and will itself inform ideation and prototyping.

5. Brainstorming

In the ideation phase of design thinking, your primary task is to take all the information you’ve gathered—through user research, journey mapping, and empathizing—and use it to think of possible solutions to your end user’s problem. Having the ability to brainstorm potential solutions in a free and creative way is vital.

Some brainstorming methods commonly leveraged in design thinking include:

• Mindmapping: A method for organizing information about a central topic or idea in a nonlinear way to show unique connections
• Storyboarding: A method of walking through the user’s journey leading up to the point where they select a solution and continue to leverage it
• Crowdstorming: Collaborative brainstorming between a large number of people (in a way, reminiscent of crowdsourcing information)
• Prototyping: The process of creating solution prototypes to gauge how they perform and address the user’s problem.

Throughout brainstorming, you and your team should challenge assumptions—about your end user, their challenges, and what a solution might look like—to keep ideas flowing.

Developing Your Design Thinking Skills

Design thinking is a powerful tool for anyone involved in identifying business opportunities, finding market needs, or designing products and services. The following professionals, in particular, can benefit from developing design thinking skills:

• Current or aspiring innovation managers: Design thinking is, at its heart, a framework for innovation. As such, anyone tasked with making their organization more innovative can benefit from learning its methods.
• Product managers and developers: Design thinking empowers professionals to think about their products and services through end users’ eyes, which can lead to innovative developments.
• Marketers: To effectively market a product or service, marketers must intimately understand end users' goals and challenges, as well as the unique differentiators of their solution. Design thinking allows them to do exactly that.
• Entrepreneurs: The frameworks and techniques embraced in design thinking can be directly applied to launching and scaling a new business, which is critical for entrepreneurs.

One of the most effective ways to hone your design thinking skills is to put them into action on the job—but that takes time.

Another option is to complete an online course or workshop that teaches the tenets of design thinking. This is an especially effective path if you want to rapidly improve your design thinking skills, or if you benefit from a more structured learning environment.

Are you ready to develop your design thinking skills and become more effective at innovating within your organization? Explore Design Thinking and Innovation—one of our online entrepreneurship and innovation courses—and learn how to use design thinking strategies and frameworks in your career.