Design Thinking

Overview

Design thinking — formalized by Tim Brown at IDEO and Stanford's d.school, grounded in Simon (1969) and Rittel's "wicked problems" — replaces assumption-driven decisions with evidence from observed human behavior. Its three-lens test: every viable innovation must sit at the intersection of desirability, feasibility, and viability. Most product failures are desirability failures; teams built something technically sound that people did not want.

Composes with neighbors: use jobs-to-be-done alongside the Define stage; use mvp after Prototype; use lean-startup as the execution engine after the full five-stage cycle.

When to Use

Apply when:

• The real user problem is not yet understood — team has a solution but no observed-behavior evidence
• User adoption is failing despite a technically sound product (unresolved desirability gap)
• Team is locked into one solution direction and needs divergent thinking first
• Problem has multiple conflicting stakeholders and no single correct answer
• Team states "we already know what users need" without observational evidence
• An AI/LLM feature demos well but stalls in real use — high AI capex and AI-native competition, yet users won't adopt the generic chatbot (a desirability, not capability, gap)