IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking: Practitioner — Summary, Notes, Review
This post is for anyone who wants to change. Primarily, the experience of a user but also the way one thinks and solves problems.
I am writing, my key summary, key takeaways, notes, and review of this course.
Summary:
This course is a refresher like the first snow or first spring breeze — many of the concepts we already practice in our day-to-day life, but we don’t necessarily do the most important thing — which is focusing on User’s Experience as the end outcome.
Who should take it:
Being a Product Person, I definitely highly recommend this to every other Product Person. In a Product Person’s life, we make and contribute to many (design) decisions. One of our primary job is to define the Problem Statement — so this course is 100% applicable for all kind of Product People.
Second, this is applicable to everyone. This course is fundamental in how to collaborate, ask the right questions, solve the right problem, and be helpful and useful. So — every team member, not just from the IT department should take this short course.
Why take this course:
As you’ll see Design Thinking is for everyone and anyone interested in solving problems and improvising user experience. Even a Barista aims to improve the experience of the customers.
Key Take Aways:
- Focus on the User’s Experience as the single most important thing
- Before solving anything — first, find out for Whom and Why
- Draft your problem statement in an iterative manner with the end user in focus
- Everything can be improved — but must not be improved — focus on the most important ones — and treat everything as a prototype — even your product running in production with millions of users
- Highly Value divergence and Brainstorming but also drive toward alignment
Review:
- Theoretically, Design Thinking is very different than the concept of Agile, but this course reminds me of the basics of Agile and Scrum, such as collaboration, user involvement, feedback cycle (Retrospective), Playback vs Demo, prototyping, and so on.
- This course comes with its own unique concepts of User-Centric and Experience driven approaches. The focus is on getting the problem statement right and focusing on the experience rather outcome/process.
- This is a short course that introduces us to the concepts of Design Thinking but does not make us proficient (and it does not intend to).
- I absolutely loved the user interface, depth, details, and content of the course.
Conclusion:
This is a free course that can be done in under half-day. With that investment, there is high value in the concepts to practice at the workplace.
My Notes:
Along the way, the course provides the summary pdf, which can be greatly helpful. Nevertheless, I made some notes for myself. And, I am happy to share this with you as well.
View my notes on LinkedIn and share your thoughts.
