I’ve seen a lot of diagrams joining Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile and I’ve drawn a fair few variants myself. It certainly doesn’t help that there are so many different ways of visualizing the design thinking process – but that’s for another day.
This is my favorite way of visualizing the relationship between these approaches.
Firstly, Agile throughout, it’s our way of working at different stages of a product lifecycle and in different parts of the organization. It’s not limited to IT or software development so not just ‘the build’.
Secondly, at least part of ‘build’ in Lean Startup could be the same as prototyping and testing in Design Thinking. I’ve seen these drawn as separate processes with a handover and I don’t think that’s right, especially when we think about the continuous iteration of an existing product as opposed to a new solution to an entirely new problem. While an amount of prototyping and testing might done in ‘design’ in simple prototyping tools, it seems entirely likely that some of it could be done with MVP delivery, AB testing, etc on a real product.
Things to think about…
- How do you think about these approaches interact?
- Does it vary by type and maturity of product?