From the course: Design Thinking: Understanding the Process

Who's involved in a design thinking exercise?

From the course: Design Thinking: Understanding the Process

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Who's involved in a design thinking exercise?

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- Design thinking processes can be performed in as little as one intensive week. Or can take as long as you feel is necessary to really understand and validate solutions to your users' issues. Representatives from every discipline need to be involved in the design thinking exercise. Business, IT, marketing, legal, design, user research, testers, ops and so on. This is the only way to ensure that all the different perspectives are covered and that everyone is on the same page. There are some other groups in your organization who need to be aware of what you're doing so they can give input, but they probably don't need to be there all the time every day. I like to run 20 minute demos every morning to show what we did the day before. Some people you should invite to those demos are legal, your internationalization or localization team, technical architects, and any other specialist groups who'll need to be involved later in the process. Obviously some of these roles might not exist in your organization. There might be reasons why some of these people wouldn't attend. I'm giving you this list as an indication of the breadth of experience that you want in the room when you run this session. After hearing me say that you're already thinking that this is an expensive undertaking because it takes time from all these people's schedules. The thing is, they'll all be involved at some point it's either now, upfront gaining a common understanding, or it's later on in a never ending line of meetings where you have to go over the justifications for the project time and time again. And to be honest, what else really should these people be doing at the definition phase of a project? Design thinking helps every discipline get clearer about what their role will be, what tasks they need to perform, and what type of support they'll need to provide as the project moves forward.

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