How to apply design thinking to customer development

How To Apply Design Thinking To
Customer Development
Harry Alford
Humble Ventures
h

How To Apply Design Thinking To Customer Development | March 2020
How To Apply Design Thinking To Customer
Development
For entrepreneurs with a concept or
early-stage startup, there is a
problem/solution ﬁt before product/market ﬁt.
This also couldn’t be more the case when
launching a new project or spinning out a
venture within a large enterprise.
According to Simon-Kucher & Partners,
customers don’t care about seven out of 10
new products introduced to the market. One
way to ensure customers want your product is
by having a strong value proposition.
Utilizing design thinking tools allows you to
design products and services that customers
want regardless of the size of your enterprise.
Source: https://openviewpartners.com/blog/ux-strategy-the-ceo-guide-to-crafting-a-winning-customer-experience/#.Xl1UuxNKju0

Agenda
• Design Thinking
• Customer Development
• Exercise Overview
• Sailboat
• Empathy Map
• Lean Canvas
• Cover Story
• Conclusion

Design Thinking Is A Prescription For Innovation
Design thinking refers to the cognitive, strategic and practical
processes by which design concepts are developed.
Design thinking is also associated with prescriptions for the
innovation of products and services within business and social
contexts.
In their book Creative Conﬁdence, Tom and David Kelley note the
importance of empathy with clients, users, and customers as a
basis for innovative design.
Setting a framework with benchmarks can help measure success as
well as realize speciﬁc objectives like price point, technology, and
market segment.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking

Customer Development Is The Path Of Winners
Customer development is a formal methodology for building startups
and new corporate ventures.
Many companies spend most of their time reﬁning the product instead
of getting out of the building and learning how to meet the customers
problems/needs.
Steve Blank, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur recognized for developing
the customer development method that launched the lean startup
movement, identiﬁed four steps of customer development:
Source: https://steveblank.com/2009/09/17/the-path-of-warriors-and-winners/

Design Thinking Vs Customer Development
Design Thinking starts with:
“I need to understand customer needs and iterate
prototypes until I ﬁnd a technology and product that satisﬁes
this need.”
Customer Development starts with:
“I have a technology/product, now who do I sell it to?”
Source: https://steveblank.com/2014/07/30/driving-corporate-innovation-design-thinking-customer-development/

Applying Design Thinking To Customer Development
Design thinking and customer
development are both customer
discovery processes.
However, if you want to get it right
before making big bets while
optimizing for speed on limited
resources, then these processes are
a winning combination.
Below are just four exercises
sequenced in a way to help deﬁne
the current state of your business,
identify your audience, make a
business case, and envision future
success:
Additional Resources:
● Gamestorming
● Strategyzer
● Leanstack
●

Sailboat: Deﬁning The Current State
Objective: Sailboat is inspired by Dave Gray’s Speedboat activity. This exercise helps you
get insight about the current state of the business and what might be an obstacle to
progress.
Source: https://gamestorming.com/?s=speedboat

THE SAILS: What speeds us up?
How To Play Sailboat
THE ANCHORS: What slows us down?
● What are the key drivers behind our growth?
● What is currently working and contributing to forward momentum?
● This exercise helps to identify these critical attributes, and understand
what activities drive value for our organization
● What hinders our ability to deliver value?
● What are the key blockers at the moment?
● What currently prevents the organization from achieving our goals?
● This helps to identify the key barriers that prevent your engine from
reaching its full potential.
Draw a boat which represents your company, product or service. Ask players to spend 10 minutes
reviewing all the positive things about the business in its current state and post them on the sails.
Repeat for all the negatives and place post-its on anchors. Spend 10 minutes reviewing the exercise.

Empathy Map: Understanding The Customer
Objective: An empathy map is a collaborative tool teams can use to gain a deeper insight
into its customers. An empathy map can represent a group of users or customer segments.

How To Play Empathy Map
Let’s imagine that in this scenario: we
are going to sell something to Santa
Claus — what would his empathy map
look like?
In order for you to sell something to
Santa, you should consider framing the
story through how your solution helps
alleviate Santa’s pain, helps him execute
on his jobs-to-be-done and address his
gains. - Ajit Verghese
Source: https://gamestorming.com/empathy-mapping/
When building your empathy map,
you ﬁrst need to deﬁne who you
are speaking about. Give them a
name.
Separate the circle into sections
that represent aspects of that
person’s sensory experience. What
are they thinking, feeling, saying,
doing, and hearing?
Label the appropriate sections on
the image.
Time: 20 minutes

Problem Solution
Key Metrics
Unique Value
Proposition
Unfair Advantage
Channels
Customer Segments
Cost Structure Revenue Streams
1 3 2
67
4
8 5
9
A brief description of the
top 3 problems that exist
What is the single, clear,
compelling message that
states why your solution is
different, useful and worth
engaging?
Who are the
customers/users? What
does our audience look
like? How do we segment
them to appropriate
granularity?
Free and Paid channels
used to reach the target
customer.
Something that cannot be
copied or bought.
What is the minimum ‘feature’
set (MVP) that demonstrates
the UVP up above?
Describe the key actions
that generates revenue or
indicates value.
List out all fixed and variable costs.
How is revenue generated? What are the assumptions
for how the UVP is monetized?
Lean Canvas: Making A Business Case
Objective: The Lean Canvas is a one-page simple framework which serves to deﬁne and support
the business case for what you have envisioned. The Lean Canvas is a paper prototype of the
concept you deﬁned.

How To Build A Lean Canvas
The Lean Canvas is comprised of nine building blocks.
You ﬁrst want to articulate who your customer/user is and
determine what their problems are. It’s only after you identify a
problem before you can have a solution in place.
Once you believe to have a solution for the problem you can
determine your unique value proposition, the channels where you’ll
be selling to customers, revenue streams, costs, key metrics and
your unfair advantage.
Nothing in the Lean Canvas is permanent or at least not early on.
Adjust and change who your customer is or even your solution
based on market feedback.
Time: 20 minutes
Source: https://medium.com/humble-ventures/how-you-can-formulate-a-hypothesis-with-a-lean-canvas-e583988c311

Cover Story: Visioning Future Success
Objective: Cover Story is an exercise in visioning and pure imagination. The
purpose is to think expansively around an ideal future state of your business.

How To Play Cover Story
The object of the game is to suspend all
disbelief and envision a future state that
is so stellar that it landed the
organization on the cover of a well-known
magazine. Participants must pretend as
though this future has already taken place
and has been reported by the
mainstream media.
This game is worth playing because it not
only encourages people to “think big,”
but also actually plants the seeds for a
future that perhaps wasn’t possible
before the game was played.
This exercise should start to define a
concept around how we could jointly
create a valuable experience for a specific
audience. - Dave Gray
Source: https://gamestorming.com/cover-story/
Draw the magazine template with all of the
components: cover, headlines, sidebars,
quotes, brainstorm, and images.
Break players into groups equipped with
markers and post-it notes.
Ask the players to imagine the best-case
scenario for their company 1 to 10 years
out.
Give the groups 30–45 minutes to generate
this “story of the year” and represent it on
their template.
Reconvene the breakout groups and ask for
volunteers to present their visions first.
Time: 90 minutes max

Applying Design Thinking To Customer Development
Drives Innovation Forward
For an established corporation, there’s a substantial amount that
needs to happen in order to manage an effective innovation
portfolio regardless of where companies or projects are in
development.
If you’re scaling disruptive innovations with new business models,
then you are targeting non-consumers of a category. This
increases the level of difficulty and rate of failure. But sometimes
the problems are well defined and can be solved through design
thinking exercises.
These are just four ways to apply design thinking to customer
development. Still, when facilitated appropriately, they provide a
strong foundation for defining the current state, understanding
the customer, making a business case, and visioning success.
Source: https://medium.com/humble-ventures/how-to-lead-breakthrough-innovation-in-your-established-corporation-2f69bee05db0

How To Apply Design Thinking To
Customer Development
For More Information Contact: start@humble.vc

Want To Dig Deeper? Click Below...
• Getting inside the Mind of Santa: Empathy Mapping to
deﬁne Sales targets
• How To Measure Your Customers’ Willingness To Pay
• The 5 Step Framework For Gaining Traction

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