I genuinely can’t believe that this course has ended – it seems like just yesterday that I was stepping into the design studio for the first time, completely unaware of what to expect. Now, as I sit down to reflect on the entire semester, I’m realizing how many amazing lessons I’ve learned throughout this class.
- Teams that push boundaries, and push each other, are the best. To be quite honest, when I first heard that we were being randomly assigned to teams, I did a slight internal eye roll. In past experiences, this method has left me in teams where I’ve felt undervalued or overworked. I have no idea why I got placed with my other 3 team members (and I think it’s better that way), but I couldn’t imagine it any other way. My “team of champions”, as we endearingly named our GroupMe chat, was compromised of drastically different individuals. Besides the one commonality of all being seniors in the business school, our majors, hobbies, and personality traits were all over the board. During my summer internship, we did a design thinking project in self-picked teams. Though that project turned out well, I sometimes felt that we all had the same way of thinking and, because of that, had a harder time innovating. The diversity in my team for this course was truly our greatest asset – myself and my teammates looked at almost every issue from four different viewpoints. At first, this seemed overwhelming, but we quickly learned how to push each other to bigger and better solutions. Our frequent team meetings were always lively with discussion, debate, and difficult decisions. It was the perfect balance – I never once felt that my toes were stepped on and also never felt that I couldn’t speak up when I disagreed. I don’t think I’ve ever been as proud to present a project before, because I knew this one was truly an embodiment of all of our ideas.
- Trust the process, there’s a reason for every step. Over the course of this project, there were moments that were exhilarating, moments that were frustrating, and every emotion in between. There were times were I wish we could slow down and spend longer on a task or speed up through a task that didn’t seem to be value-adding to our project. Reflecting back now, I honestly can’t pinpoint a “pointless” part of the process. For example, my team had a lot of frustration during the empathy map step. We were confused and honestly, I just didn’t see how this was going to impact what we chose to innovate in the end. I’m so glad I took a deep breath and put real effort into this step, because now I see it as such an integral part of the journey. And along with difficult moments, there were also so many exciting pieces of the puzzle. I remember the exact moment during the ideate phase where my team and I were staring at our whiteboard and the idea just *clicked*. All of our research, observations, and interviews had culminated into this one idea, scribbled down on a yellow Post-it note. I’ve always been someone who loves going into a project with as many details as possible – but that’s just not possible with design thinking. Every step is unpredictable, but that’s what allows for creative solutions. Learning to put equal effort into every step, whether or not I saw the value at that time, was such a critical lesson to learn this semester.
- Products are for people – and purpose matters. In the business world, I think it’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole of revenue and profits and forget why we are creating ideas in the first place. By using qualitative data, which I had little experience with before, I was able to see that the emotions behind consumers’ behaviors are just as important as the quantitative data surrounding purchases or retention rates. A key moment for me was during the ideate phase when we categorized our ideas into four quadrants. I remember we had all of these ideas that seemed great on the surface, but when we really evaluated them, they may have been “fun” or “cool”, but they didn’t improve graduates’ students well-being. Coming up with the R&R box showed me that creativity and utility can coexist – you can ideate to solve a relevant and real issue for your target market, while also making the idea innovative. One of the most rewarding parts of this project was imagining how our product could enhance real peoples’ lives and how the simple purpose we converged on – connection building – came to life through the features of our product. We didn’t have to look at percentages or financial data to come up with our idea, but instead, we took the time to understand our consumer on a human level and made a product just for them.
- Accept, and embrace, change. Like I said before, the design thinking process truly is unpredictable. Though there’s a framework, communicating with real people in almost every step means that you never know what kind of conversations you’ll have or data you’ll gather. And with this unpredictability can come a lot of change. There were a couple points during the project where my team had to narrow our focus, toss out an idea we initially thought was really viable, or change our trajectory. I’m not big on change, so the first time this happened, I think I had a slight internal freak out. To me, it seemed like wasted time and energy to take steps backward. However, now I see that’s not the case at all. Change doesn’t equate to failure and iterating throughout the process is essential. There’s a slim chance that the first rainbow you hop on is going to lead to a pot of gold, but that doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. In fact, change often meant for my team that we came to terms with a new insight or found another exciting problem to solution for. By going into every class session and team meeting ready to put in persistent work to get the job done, myself and my team were able to recover from setbacks and remain calm throughout the process.
I am so incredibly grateful to have taken part in such an immersive and rewarding course and I know the lessons I’ve learned will positively impact the way I look at problem-solving, no matter what role I end up in after graduation.