Innovation is highly valued but can be difficult in practice. How do you execute innovation and ensure products resonate with customers?
“Whether they’re big or small, innovations are best when they address real, human needs,” says Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar in the online course Design Thinking and Innovation. “Designing a new product, service, business model, or strategy is about changing your thinking process. Interestingly, and perhaps counterintuitively, it can be done using a systematic approach.”
This systematic approach is design thinking, a process popularized by Tim Brown, CEO and president of design company IDEO, in a 2008 Harvard Business Review article. Since then, design thinking has gained traction as a tried-and-true process for creating user-centric innovations.
Leveraging design thinking at work can help shift your mindset, lead teams toward innovation, and create products with tangible value that increase your organization’s revenue. Here’s an overview of design thinking and how you can use it to accelerate your career.
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DOWNLOAD NOWWhat Is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a problem-solving approach that enacts innovation centered on customer needs. It’s both user-centric and solutions-based, which sets it apart from other problem-solving frameworks.
“User-centric” means the process focuses on customers’ wants and needs instead of what professionals believe would be the best product. This requires empathizing with the product’s end user and is where design thinking overlaps with the human-centered design process.
“Solutions-based” means that the process focuses on identifying potential solutions to a problem rather than the problem itself. This slight, yet crucial, distinction can enable you to avoid preconceived notions of how to solve problems.
There are four stages of the design thinking process:
- Clarify: Observe users and reframe a problem to gain deeper insights into what they need.
- Ideate: Generate innovative ideas to fulfill users’ needs; no idea is too far-fetched.
- Develop: Combine ideas into concepts and test each with early prototypes.
- Implement: Effectively communicate an innovation’s value to stakeholders and put a solution into action.
Learning design thinking can be an asset to your career, whether you want to advance within your organization or make a change. Here are six ways you can accelerate your career by learning design thinking.
Related: 5 Examples of Design Thinking in Business
6 Career Benefits of Design Thinking
1. Develop New Products That Meet Customer Needs and Drive Revenue
With design thinking skills comes the ability to develop product innovations that add value to customers’ lives and drive revenue for your firm.
Because design thinking is so user-centric, innovative products, by definition, add value to customers’ lives. This can increase sales and improve revenue, customer satisfaction, net promoter score, and referral rates.
Using design thinking, you can continually iterate on existing products and create new ones that meet customer pain points as they arise—leading to greater business performance over time. This kind of business impact can help you pursue promotions and career moves.
2. Gain a Deep Understanding of Customers
Design thinking’s user-centric approach requires you to deeply understand customers’ motivations, fears, dreams for the future, daily habits, and pain points. Developing empathy for the people who use your product allows you to innovate for their actual needs rather than what you think they need.
This deep level of customer understanding that design thinking imparts is useful for professionals in any industry, including:
- Marketers, who can leverage it to meet potential customers in the correct stage of the user journey and develop content they’ll derive value from
- Sales professionals, who can use it to advocate for why a product is the right fit for a potential customer
- Customer service representatives, who can use it to anticipate and respond to customer needs in real time
- Information technology professionals, who can leverage it to create an optimized user experience from a technology perspective
Related: How to Conduct Market Research for a Startup
3. Save Time, Money, and Effort
Design thinking can streamline the innovation process, making it a purposeful, efficient part of daily operations. A single, efficient process for innovating can save time, money, and effort compared to running on a trial-and-error basis.
While failures and mistakes are an expected part of testing ideas and product iterations, design thinking accounts for these and makes them part of the process with actionable next steps.
For employees or job candidates, the ability to innovate with a positive return on investment is invaluable.
Related: How to Calculate ROI to Justify a Project
4. Gain a Competitive Edge in the Job Market
If you’re a job seeker, it's a critical time to invest in design thinking skills. According to data from Emsi Burning Glass, job postings requiring design thinking skills significantly increased from December 2020 to December 2021.
Not only are there more jobs requiring design thinking skills, but those that do offer higher average salaries than those that don’t. It can literally pay off to be well-versed in design thinking.
For example, job postings for marketing manager positions that don’t list design thinking as a required skill offer a median salary of $107,900. Postings for the role that require design thinking offer a median salary of $133,900—a 24 percent increase.
5. Overcome Cognitive Fixedness
One of the key tenants of design thinking is overcoming cognitive fixedness—the state of mind in which one consciously or unconsciously assumes there’s only one way to interpret or approach a situation.
Design thinking requires breaking out of cognitive fixedness when looking at your product (“What else could this product do?”) and when considering potential solutions to problems (“It’s always been solved this way. What if we tried this instead?”).
Like a muscle, overcoming cognitive fixedness becomes easier the more you do it. By using design thinking to guide your work, you can practice out-of-the-box thinking and excel in any problem-solving scenario.
6. Lead a Team Toward Innovation
Paired with leadership skills, an intimate knowledge of the design thinking process can enable you to lead innovation within your organization.
With one streamlined framework, you can empower your team to take ownership of each part of the process, work together to pool knowledge and diverse perspectives, and track and measure tangible results.
Leading this process can prove to be an asset for your firm and set you up for career advancement.
Adopting a Design Thinking Mindset
To learn how to apply design thinking to your organization, consider taking an online course. Design Thinking and Innovation provides instruction on key frameworks and concepts, as well as hands-on opportunities to apply your knowledge to examples from your life.
When it comes down to it, the best way to build design thinking skills is by practicing with real-world situations.
“There’s only one way to learn design thinking,” Datar says. “You have to jump in.”
Are you interested in learning more about design thinking? Explore our seven-week online course Design Thinking and Innovation—one of our entrepreneurship and innovation courses—to discover how to use design thinking principles and innovative problem-solving tools to help you and your business succeed.
