As a product designer, we go way back with Design Thinking. For us and many like us in our field, it’s a valuable problem-solving protocol that emphasizes prototyping and which focuses on solutions to the right problems.

But a lot of people across different industries are talking about design thinking these days. It’s now a corporate buzzword, applicable in a number of different scenarios wherever innovation is called for.

Design Thinking as a Paradigm for Teamwork

All sorts of businesses, even outside the field of software development, have given a lot of credence to Design Thinking as a great model for their teams to follow. With the way they’ve interpreted the concept, it has morphed into a broader, generalized idea. For them, it’s has come to signify an approach to governing the way people work together.

We’re all about that here at Making Sense. But as a development company, we also adhere to something much closer to the original meaning of Design Thinking (DT), guiding the way we bring products to life.

Design Thinking is How We Bring Products to Life

Since we’ve been honing our product development skills beneath a Design Thinking umbrella for many years now, we thought we’d share some of what we know. Here’s how DT shapes the way we bring software products to life.

We Use DT to Simplify Things When Goals are Unclear

Customers come to us with product briefs but we never, ever make assumptions about what we are supposed to do. Everything is questioned. All given parameters are cross-examined against what we believe the problem to be. And when we’re not given well-defined objectives, Design Thinking helps us arrive at the best way to provide the right solution for the right problem.

We Weave the UX Into Practically Everything We Do

Specifically, we put ourselves in the client’s customers’ shoes… complementing the client’s goal while focusing directly on the end users’ needs. We imagine different scenarios and iterate toward prototypes for them all to see what works. It allows us to overcome challenges that we might not have even thought of had we not taken this customer-centric approach.

We Combine DT With Agile Development

If Design Thinking is an approach, Agile Development is the methodology that enables that approach to work. It gives us a structure we need to cycle through all the iterations we need to arrive at a solution to our client’s problem(s).

It’s All About Delivering Outcomes to Our Clients

We have circled around the Design Thinking some years now, and have come to rely upon it as a vital tool in our product development toolbox. Without it, we’d be falling short of our goals, which pretty much come out to delivering outcomes, not just services.