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Lean vs. Agile vs. Design Thinking

What You Really Need to Know to Build High-Performing Digital Product Teams
Jeff Gothelf • Sense & Respond © 2017 • 56 pages

Management / Management Concepts / Lean Management

Management / Management Concepts / Agility
Innovation / Product Development / Design Thinking

Take-Aways
• When engineers use Agile, product managers use Lean Start-Up and designers use Design
Thinking, aligning these methods is a challenge.
• Agile product development emphasizes quick responses to changing circumstances in the
development and delivery of digital products.
• With Lean Start-Up, each new project is an experiment that explores a potential business model.
• Design Thinking helps companies empathize with customers so they can make products that users
will value.
• Draw on the commonalities in these approaches, using iterative, experimental patterns and regular
retrospective evaluations.
• Explore potential areas with high-risk, high-reward testing. Build in predelivery time for learning
and product discovery.
• Reorganize teams for balance. Provide incentives for learning and collaboration. Stay open and
transparent to build trust.
• Keep your customer at the center of every process and product.

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 Recommendation
Jeff Gothelf distills two decades of experience in this slim volume outlining how to combine the best
elements of product development strategies – Agile, Lean Start-Up and Design Thinking – for your end
user’s maximum benefit. Gothelf focuses on the practices these methods share and suggests ways to
create an aligned team of your technical, design and managerial personnel. His central points come down to:
Put your customers first, and be flexible as you experiment with different tactics.

Summary

When engineers use Agile, product managers use Lean Start-Up and designers
use Design Thinking, aligning these methods is a challenge.

You might think it wise to let these internal groups use whichever methodology works best for them.
Unfortunately, these differing approaches produce outcomes and incentives that often clash. Engineers
concentrate narrowly on getting features completed and out the door as quickly as possible, but they
sometimes lack a clear understanding of customer needs. Product managers prioritize tasks and
assignments based on intuition and the influential voices of business stakeholders, not customers. Designers
who generate product concepts often lack grounding in the products’ practicality or in how they mesh with
the company’s overall strategy.

“Tech teams focused on increasing velocity. Product teams focused on reducing waste.
Design teams wanted lengthy, up-front research and design phases to help discover what
teams should work on.”

Agile, Lean Start-Up and Design Thinking each came into being to address a specific problem. And as
each became increasingly standardized and commodified, it morphed over time to be more specific
and restricted in practice. These days, firms use Agile mostly to deliver excellent code quickly and
efficiently, overlooking the other important components of successful digital products. Lean Start-Up
has focused on the concept of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which means most companies end
up producing a series of Phase I products with no further refinement or development. Design Thinking,
intended to promote the customers’ perspective in every aspect of the business process, has ended up
sequestered with design teams instead of drawing participants from throughout the company. The result is
creative work that has no buy-in or input from other elements of the business.

Agile product development emphasizes quick responses to changing circumstances

in the development and delivery of digital products.

The creators of the Agile philosophy sought to address the many uncertainties that affect software
development. Market conditions, the presence and actions of competitors, the underlying economic
variables, and the level of complexity of the problems engineers must solve make it difficult to manage the
software development process effectively. The Agile approach uses short work cycles – often called “sprints”
– followed by pauses to assess what the team has accomplished or learned, and to determine whether to
continue on the same path or to pivot.

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 “We value responding to change over following a plan.”

The level of uncertainty in software development has diminished somewhat since the publication of the
Agile Manifesto. The advent of DevOps let engineers ship code to customers continuously rather than in
discrete releases at intervals. This allows for much more rapid cycles of feedback that increase the value of
the Agile approach.

The big challenge for Agile lies in deploying at scale. Having feedback continuously pouring in from 100
teams proves to be a much greater challenge than hearing from only five or ten. The Scaled Agile Framework
(SAFe) intends to solve this problem, but it compounds Agile’s ongoing issues resulting from its failure to
incorporate the needs, concerns and contributions of other arms of the organization, including product
management, marketing and design.

With Lean Start-Up, each new project is an experiment that explores a potential
business model.

One area of overlap between the Lean Start-Up approach and the Agile methodology is their emphasis on
short cycles of experimentation and assessment. In Lean Start-Up, the crucial metric for deciding whether
to proceed or change course should be customer behavior. For example, how do users demonstrate that they
want this product or feature, and what might they be willing to pay for it?

“The question every project seeks to answer is not, ‘Can we build it?,’ it’s ‘Should we build
it?”

In practice, however, most businesses seem to have reduced the Lean Start-Up approach to building MVPs.
An MVP answers two questions: First, what does the team need to learn from this initial project? And
second, how can the team learn what it needs to know with minimum effort? In a further collapse of the
theory behind Lean, most companies now reframe the MVP as a substitute for a project’s Phase I, as they
strive to determine the minimum required specs for a product they can actually ship.

Despite the philosophy behind Lean, most companies don’t really reward their managers for experimenting,
using processes built on uncertainty or learning from failure. This leads managers to use Lean as a proof-
of-concept technique once and then to carry out the plan, no matter what. Even companies with dedicated
“innovation labs” – from which firms do not expect to earn a return – rarely create a clear path for
integrating the results of their experiments into mainstream production.

Design Thinking helps companies empathize with customers so they

can make products that users will value.

By focusing on customers’ “core needs” and encouraging people to brainstorm multiple innovative ideas,
the Design Thinking approach creates a set of solutions to explore for technical and business viability.
Most companies lack a deep-seated culture of customer-focused empathy, and so they often dismiss and
ignore the outcomes of Design Thinking sessions.

“Are we solving a real problem, for a real customer in a meaningful way?”

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 If a clear, urgent and actionable idea doesn’t emerge early on, the members of a brainstorming session may
decide the effort is a waste of time and fail to iterate the process during the project’s duration, an necessary
step for Design Thinking success. Then the essential principle of Design Thinking – that every participant
must understand the customer’s core need – falls by the wayside.

Draw on the commonalities in these approaches, using iterative, experimental

patterns and regular retrospective evaluations.

All three practices recommend undertaking trial-and-error processes in short cycles. But, trial and error
is risky, unless you run it in small, incremental steps and conduct frequent, thoughtful retrospectives.
Regular review of a team’s progress and the lessons learned is vital, even if it can be uncomfortable in the
beginning and runs the risk of having participants see it as just an opportunity to complain. Take an hour
and try to get the team to identify what went well or what didn’t, and to agree on working to improve one
or two aspects in the next cycle. If necessary, use an outside facilitator to focus the meeting and keep it
productive.

“Your job is to pick and choose the specific elements from each practice that work well for
your teams and the brand values you’re trying to convey.”

Managers must stay close to their teams to remain aware of each step in the process. Identify systems that
work well; target them for expansion and appropriate scaling. Fix or terminate systems that aren’t working.
Don’t be rigid in applying Agile, Lean or Design Thinking practices; if an off-script approach generates great
results, run with it.

Explore potential areas with high-risk, high-reward experimentation. Build in

predelivery time for learning and product discovery.

Teams rarely have the luxury of trying things out for learning purposes. Their goal is to ship
products. Analyze the items in your team’s product or feature backlog to identify those that offer a
potentially high return for a high risk. Explore those opportunities. Figure out what you most need to know
to evaluate them, and decide what “discovery technique” to apply. If the risk is technical, you might try the
Agile “spike” technique. If you need to know whether the value proposition is strong, try A/B testing – a
classic Lean Start-Up approach. If you’re not sure whether your prospective product will meet a customer
need, try the “contextual site visit” that Design Thinking recommends.

“By limiting product discovery work to the riskiest items, you ensure the team is
delivering features while it’s learning.”

By restricting your exploration to areas with the highest payoff, you allow other development to continue on
track as your team learns. Perform user research and testing more frequently with fewer subjects. You can
get most of what you need to learn from a good script and three testers. Start there and revisit your progress
weekly. Share the results widely, right away, to maximize buy-in for next steps.

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 Reorganize teams for balance. Provide incentives for learning and collaboration.
Stay open and transparent to build trust.

The basic unit for any project should be a multidisciplinary team of engineers, designers and managers.
Break down specialty silos. Empower the team to make decisions based on its experiments, tests and
discoveries. Balanced teams can draw on the best practices from Lean, Agile and Design Thinking. Be
radically transparent. When you try a new approach or process, make sure you explain how and why
you chose it. Open your retrospectives to everyone, to make the team’s successes and struggles evident.
Share your goals for success to keep everyone on the same page. Measure and publish metrics that show
achievements on the way to your objectives, so that everybody can see how the team progresses.

“Your customers don’t care whether you practice Agile, Lean or Design Thinking…
[If] you can focus your teams on satisfying customer needs [and] collaborating to create
compelling experiences, it won’t matter which methodology they employ.”

Align incentives with the behavior and results you want to see. Evaluate employees according to those
criteria by, for example, rewarding effective collaboration or continuous learning practices. Employees who
know what processes and outcomes the company values will find the strategies from these methodologies
that help them deliver.

Keep your customer at the center of every process and product.

Agile philosophy sometimes designates the product owner or “the business” as its “customer.” But the
true customer is always the end-user of the product – as both Lean and Design Thinking prominently
emphasize. Remind your team to focus on giving customers great value for their money. To make sure that
the priorities of your product development process align with that goal, ask:

1 . How do you know you’re producing something that matters to your users?
2 . How would you discover that?
3 . Now that you know, how should you modify your priorities in a timely fashion to better serve your
customers?

About the Author

Jeff Gothelf is also the author of Lean UX, Sense & Respond and Forever Employable. He consults with
and coaches for high-growth businesses and large enterprises.

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