How NOT to do Design Thinking

So I was conducting Design Thinking training, and when we were doing the Customer Personas, apparently some of the groups were creating personas of themselves as the customers being the recipients of goods or services from an upstream process.

There is a valuable lesson here that I would want to share with you.

This will only work if you are your best customer, and you’ve created a business to cater to your needs, and your customers have similar needs as yours.

If this is not your case, then you must create a persona for your actual customers, whether they are internal or external, so long as they are recipients of your goods or services.

Here’s an example scenario:

You are in a mobile telecommunications service company called “Fonavode.” You work with a company who supplies of mobile phones to you called “Sungsam.”

Now “Sungsam” is always delayed in supplying you with the most in-demand mobile phones that your customers really want, which causes you to get a lot of customer complaints, and your customer experience is starting to suffer.

An example of a wrong way to do it, and I’ll be making up company names as we go along, is to create a persona of a “Fonavode” manager who is trying to solve the customer complaints due to the delays caused by “Sungsam.”

The right way to do it is to create a persona of a “Fonavode” customer who wants to remain as a customer of “Fonavode” while getting his hands on the latest “Sungsam” device.

See the difference? Had you taken the wrong approach, you would have plotted your own paint points as a “Fonavode” manager. But how would you solve it? By creating a new process for “Sungsam?” That’s completely outside of your control.

Whereas if you were to take the right approach, you’d plot the pain points of a “Fonavode” customer, and create a solution by finding out the ideal future state that your customer would like to achieve, and you’ll be doing that based on what’s within your control – your own business process.

Who knows, maybe the “Sungsam” units your customers were demanding for weren’t really what would be best based on their ideal future state. Maybe it should be a “Phone-eye Laxagy,” or a special “Fonavode” variant of the “Sungsam.”

The point is, you wouldn’t have known this if you took on the wrong persona.

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