Industries and trends ebb and flow. I think I might have been working during a peak for “design thinking”. Organisations like IDEO and Apple helped to establish design as the differentiating factor between successful organisations and the rest. But, in recent years I’ve seen a shift. The faith placed in “design thinking” now seems diverted into “product thinking.”

From my view, I can see how this happened. From the birth of the double diamond in 2004 through to the rise of Google Venture’s Design Sprint method, I see “design” peak around 2017. “Design thinking” felt like a bit of a cult back then. Google Trends backs up my biased and personal perspective. “Design Thinking” overtakes “product management” around 2016 — the year Jake Knapp publishes and popularises the Google 5-day Sprint Methodology. Maybe, for a brief while, “design” feels like the way you solve problems for customers and users. But then interest swings back to product management.

I don’t want to pin this all on the 5-day sprint. But design process became linked to creating value by boosting growth for quick returns, particularly in start-up contexts. This narrowed the scope and missed some of the point and purpose of design. Maybe UX Bootcamps that taught design thinking over a week or two also contributed. The “market” simplified design thinking to the bare minimum to satisfy demand. It also applied a specific method too broadly. If IDEO and “design thinking” was on the extreme of “big design,” the 5-day sprint, due to its speed, narrowed the spectrum. And this reduced palette proliferated.

People applied design sprints to problems they weren’t well-suited to solve. Then that process got chipped away at. Covid and remote working further mutated process, particularly facilitation. We seemed to sleepwalk into a situation where “design thinking” became a set of sentences that start with the phrase “How might we…” and a session of Crazy 8s. That’s not design.

If you’re always “thinking fast,” you’re missing out on a whole type of thinking (thinking slow?)… It’s also no wonder that when you adopt only a move fast mindset, you sometimes break things. [In the words of “product thinking” you don’t effectively manage your risks].

Sense-making and difference-making

I worry that the people working on digital products and services are particularly prone to cults. We like to worship founders. We like trends. I worry that the cult of “design thinking” has been replaced with a cult of “product” and that we’re in danger of losing energy and talent in the displine of UX design. When a single perspective dominates a narrative, it tends to narrow possibilities.

“Design thinking” and “Product thinking” needn’t be competing schools of thought in a zero sum game. But I think we might need to get better at understanding and describing the value of design in the context of “product organisations” and operating models. Otherwise we might find ourselves reduced to a sort of ‘5-day design.’ And by misunderstanding “design” we might end up executing deduced solutions, rather than really innovating. This dilutes “product thinking” as much as design. Product managers might develop a sort of thinned view of design as only execution. Even experienced “product people” like Marty Cagan seem surprised when they begin to fully consider and appreciate how skilled designers think and work.

I think design thinking and product thinking are similar. Both seek to understand needs and then meet them. Both rely on deep understanding of a user/customer/audience. Both use data — whether quantitive or qualitative to generate understanding. And both then form hypotheses and devise experiments to solve a problem or generate value. But, I think the unique value between the disciplines differs, subtly. In my experience, design is better at “difference making”.

In the beautifully clear sentence of Anna White, design combines “designing the right thing, and designing the thing right”. That is equally true of product thinking. Product management and product thinking is exceptional at deciding on “the right thing.” Designers design the thing right. But while both disciplines can do both. And in technical contexts, engineers might lead solution identification and generation. The true value of design in product organisations isn’t in the sensemaking elements of design thinking. It’s in the generation and translation of ideas — describing how to make a difference.

Marty Cagan describes the difference between product teams and feature teams. Feature teams build what they’re told. Empowered product teams are given problems to solve and risks to manage. But the best product teams are creative. They know the right risks. But alongside the risks in the landscape, they can populate it with more of the right type of problems and more possible solutions. If you want to compete in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, you need a mature design capability, working alongside skilled product managers to blend three types of thinking.

Deduction is the first. It happens when we logically move from the general to the specific. It generates certainty and facts. It’s great for priorisation and drawing conclusions in information-rich environments. Induction is the second type of thinking. It does something similar with less data. It generates a prediction rather than the more solid conclusion of deduction. Induction allows us to build theories from data. Deduction allows us to validate them. But this thinking makes sense of what is already in the system. To create innovation and gain a competitive edge, you need skilled people who can think in a third way: abduction. Abduction isn’t about kidnapping your competitors. Abduction generates new ideas.

I previously defined design as “the translation of intent into experiments designed to generate value.” But that too could be describing product management. The true value of design is how it can generate new “language” to aid that translation. It can do this through process and facilitation to blend the “dialects” of different disciplines. But the true value of design is the creative generation of new “words” and “phrases.” Design generates the language of innovation. It moves away from what we know to find new possibilities, moving from deducted certainties, or inducted predictions to abducted possibilities – and because design is a structured process for managing ideas, it tests and de-risks along the way.

Design allows us manipulate constraints to create new value out of existing resources. Or it can help someone with an idea but no language to describe it find a way to turn the thoughts in their head into tangible expressions. Tangible ideas can then be shared with colleagues or users at different levels of fidelity. That’s the value of design when paired with “product thinking”. Design makes new things. Marty Cagan says that ideas can come from anywhere — customers, data, sales teams, technology trends, competitors. And he stresses that effective product thinking isn’t about where the idea comes from, but rather about how thoroughly they’re validated before becoming built feature. But, you definitely need ideas. And you need the skills to manage and communicate them — blending deduction, induction and abduction. The most effective form of creation and validation will blend the three types of thinking I’ve described. And successful organisations need to be able to do all three because the risks and rewards we see from the different styles of thinking differ.

Creativity creates. Design isn’t just ideation. But if you’re an organisation that doesn’t understand or value design, you might find yourself reduced to deduction and induction. Your “continuous discovery” might be reduced to incremental improvements and aping the competition. And you might end up just following trends, rather than setting them. If you don’t have competency in different thinking styles or if the order of your thinking is limited to ‘decide, analyse, create’ — you can only deal with certain situations – cynefin taught us that. Effective organisations can switch that sequence depending on their context. We need the greatest number of good ideas – and the right forms of validation to test them. Partnering and pairing design thinking with product thinking expands the range of possibilities open to organisations.

Maybe I’ve got nostalgic for 2018, when design thinking was ‘on trend’. But I do think a dominant narrative can sometimes narrow debate and therefore reduce practice and the possibilities that we see. So, even if we are living in the age of “product thinking” dominance, I still think there’s a specific and valuable role for design.