Design Thinking for product & service innovation

In a world, where customers quickly abandon products and services that fail to meet their needs, it is critical to know how to build trust, talk to people with empathy & efficiency, and identify their real needs, desires and constraints. Gaining deep & accurate insights about peoples’ real world experience is the foundation of all innovation. 

This training is for Product Managers, Product Owners, UX Designers, Team Leads, Scrum Masters, Project Managers, Business Analysts and anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of and excel in human-centred innovation. If you want to do better customer discovery, and quickly and effectively understand what matters to your customers and users, and the best way for your products to provide greater value, then this is for YOU.

You’ll learn what Design Thinking is and how it works in the real world. You’ll understand the process, the mindset, the most useful tools, the most common pitfalls, and a range of ways of applying Design Thinking to product & service innovation. We will cover what it is that makes Design Thinking one of the most powerful methodologies for product management.

Once you have an overview of the end-to-end process, we will deep dive into the first and second phases of Design Thinking: Empathise and Define.

Empathise is all about understanding the people who you are creating products or services for. We cover customer and user research in depth, you will learn a range of techniques and get to practice them in the training.

Define is all about making the most of the insights you’ve gathered in Empathise. You get to look across the results of your customer and user research in order to identify the deepest and most useful insights. We then teach you how to visually communicate these insights so that a project team can work with them easily. We cover user journeys, story maps, personas, and user stories.

By the end of the training, you will have a robust understanding of the end-to-end Design Thinking process plus a level of expertise in executing the first two phases of the process, which form the foundation of any innovation.

Along the way, we’ll build in key aspects of product management that underpin great discovery: why it is important, how to approach and plan discovery, validation and experimentation, and tools, techniques and frameworks that will instantly give you the confidence to make it happen.

Format

• 1 Day in-person training, led by two expert facilitators.
• Slidedeck and workbook, shared with participants.

Learning Modules

• The value of discovery - where it is useful (and where it is not).
• Design Thinking overview - process, mindset, tools, pitfalls, outcomes, applications.
• Design Thinking in product management.
• Empathise - deep dive & practice: customer research, interviews, shadowing, surveys.
• Define - deep dive & practice: analyse & synthesise customer insights, user journeys, story maps, personas, user stories.
• Planning good discovery - what to consider.
• Tools, frameworks, techniques to apply to your own work.

This training is for you, if you want to:

• Expand your toolkit and expertise in deeply understanding the needs of your customers and users, your ability to conduct effective research, and articulate key findings in a clear, visual and actionable manner.
• Drive innovation in your products, services, and projects.
• Establish a human-centric mindset that seeks to understand first, and resist the temptation to prematurely jump to solutions.
• Develop robust, customer-centric solutions that meet real needs and delight users.
• Build good, effective and fast discovery and validation into your product or service design process.

After this training, you will be able to:

• Apply the principles, tools, and mindset of customer-centric product discovery and design thinking in relevant areas of the product and design process.
• Conduct fast, effective customer, user, and market research.
• Extract and prioritise the key insights from your research and communicate them visually to stakeholders and project teams, using customer journeys, story maps, personas, and user stories.
• De-risk your projects and initiatives by implementing robust customer research, rapid prototyping, and solution validation.
• Confidently apply state-of-the-art product management and design thinking practices, and be a champion of excellence.

Trainers

This training is delivered by Tasneem Gould and René Andersen. 

Tasneem has over 15 years of experience in Product Management, Product Strategy, and Customer Experience Design. Passionate about understanding customers' needs and building great products, Tas has worked with iconic New Zealand companies, including Xero, Deloitte, MYOB, Orion Health, Caterpillar, and Pegasus Health. Tas was named APAC Community Leader of the year at the 2020 'Leading The Product' conference, and has been a speaker at national and international events. 

René is a HPI (Hasso Plattner Institute) certified Design Thinking coach, and has taught and coached hundreds of people in Design Thinking. Early in life, René completed post-graduate degrees in Physics and Philosophy, and spent twelve years in the academic world. In 2011, he moved across to the corporate world, initially as an advisor for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment in Wellington, New Zealand. Since then, he has worked with American Express, Deloitte, Audi, Swiss Post, Transport for New South Wales, Wikimedia Foundation and other large organisations in Australia, Europe, North America and New Zealand.