From Design Thinking to A/B Testing

As product people, we are basically problem solvers. Most of the time the problems we are given by our users or stakeholders are just symptoms, or side effects, rather than the root cause leading to the problem. And sometimes we aren’t given a problem at all. That’s why we always need to start with identifying the right problems which starts with asking the right questions. Because at the end of the day solving a wrong problem might be worse than having no solution at all.

This is where I find design thinking quite valuable within the product management process and I think that it is one of the most powerful mindsets that empowers product people. In a nutshell, design thinking is a process for creative problem solving which takes human-centered design at its core. It gives a rough structure to us to create products that are usable, viable, feasible and desirable at the same time.

There are many different approaches and tools in design thinking. You can see the d.school approach below where there are 6 different phases which are not linear but iterative. So there is always a back and forth during the process to be sure that we are working on the right problem and the right solution. For instance during testing we might see that our proposed solution does not fit our user and go back to tweaking our prototype or even our point of view.

This entire process is also separated in to two phases:

1- Problem space

2- Solution space.

In both these phases, we use the convergence and divergence model, also known as the double diamond method.

In the problem space, where our aim is to understand the people that we are trying to create solutions for, we start with questioning the problem we initially had, expand its scope and diverge a lot to find all the underlying problems. Then we converge until we find our real problem statement. After we are done with the problem space, we start with diverging to all possible solutions and then again converge to one proposed solution.

By using design thinking methodology during the product management process, we are trying to do our best to be as human-centered as possible. But how about being data driven?

The most important thing here is to be sure that having the right blend of qualitative and quantitative data in our hand, which helps us to understand both what people do and why they behave that way.

To have this holistic picture, we need to be data driven and also human-centered at the same time so that we can find real insights to make the right decisions towards building the right product for people.

This is where we can use A/B testing with all the other techniques to make data-driven and informed decisions. Together, digital experimentation and continuous delivery allow us to accelerate delivery of software confidently and with less risk, control the deployment of new features and experiment throughout the entire product development lifecycle.

I’ll be sharing more about my learnings in A/B testing in my next posts, so stay tuned!