Solving Problems with Design Thinking

As companies evolve to adopt, integrate, and leverage software as the defining element of their success in the 21st century, a rash of processes and methodologies are vying for their product teams' attention. In the worst of cases, each discipline on these teams - product management, design, and software engineering - learn a different model.

Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie educate listeners on one of the hottest trends in business development: "design thinking", or the ability to turn abstract ideas into practical applications for maximal business growth. Jeanne Liedtka's recent book, The Catalyst: How YOU Can Lead Extraordinary Growth, was named a Top Innovation and Design Thinking Book by Business Week. Tim Ogilvie has been hailed as a visionary for his pioneering contributions to service innovation, business model innovation, and customer experience design.

The CEO and president of IDEO writes that when designers are involved from the very beginning of the innovation process, startling new ideas can result - as a U.S. health care provider, a Japanese bicycle components manufacturer, and a system of Indian eye hospitals learned.

You might've talked about innovation with your IT department or software development agency lately and the words "design thinking" were surely mentioned. So what is it? Just another piece of business jargon to add to your arsenal or a useful tool? Or maybe even an overestimated hype? Nowadays every organization or business runs into a myriad of problems as business models become increasingly more complex. Globalization and advances in communication and technology, all add up to creating unique opportunities but also new challenges that are not easy to solve applying the old tested methods.

In The Startup Way, Eric Ries shares his insights, stories and best practices, delivering a critical toolkit to solve all business challenges. Today every company needs to get faster and smarter. Listen to The Startup Way and discover how to embrace change, survive and thrive.

The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a start-up or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice.

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day. How should you be focusing your efforts? What will your idea look like in real life? How do you start? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you've got the right solution? Now there's a surefire way to answer these important questions: the sprint.

This book is a practical guide that explores how startup entrepreneurs and business leaders, who hold no design degrees, can integrate service design into their development cycles to create sustainable, desirable, and profitable new services.

 How can we apply technology to drive business value? For years we've been told that the performance of software delivery teams doesn't matter - that it can't provide a competitive advantage to our companies. Through four years of groundbreaking research to include data collected from the State of DevOps reports conducted with Puppet, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance - and what drives it - using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research, making the information accessible for listeners to apply in their own organizations. 

"I know what I should do. I just don't know why I don't do it." This phrase captures a universal human experience - we can't always get ourselves to do what we know is best for us. In Well Designed Life, you will learn that the solution to this stumbling block resides in coupling two disciplines: brain science and design thinking. Brain and behavior sciences have exploded in recent years. This catalyzes new insights into why we do what we do - and how we can change. We are living in the age of design - and designers are the new rock stars.

How do today's most successful tech companies - Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla - design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently from the vast majority of tech companies. In Inspired, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides listeners with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

This book is for organizations starting their UX journey. It will help to address the basics of UX. There is practical guidance for building a business case and identifying the key investments required in people and process that will bring about the change needed to deliver success. Implementing UX is brought to life through the UX Lifecycle, a methodology framework that was born out of real life successes. At the heart of the UX process is the most important stakeholder - the user!

In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact. Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how - by saying less and asking more - you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.

Womack and Jones, the authors of The Machine That Changed the World and creators of the "lean enterprise" theory, take leanness to the next step with a focus on what the customer really wants, not what it is possible to get him to accept. This is the management book for the next business generation.